Editorial
We scored every city in our index on the price tier of the bars our editors track there. Each venue is graded $ to $$$$. A city full of $$$$ rooms scores near 100. A city of honest $$ neighbourhood bars scores low. The result is one number per city, comparable across all 72.
Dubai leads at 84.8, ahead of Marrakech on 82.5 and Seoul on 80.0. Krakow is the cheapest big-city night out in the index at 59.0, with Copenhagen and Houston close behind. The gap between top and bottom is 25.8 points, a real spread in what a round costs before you have ordered a thing.
The score is a venue price index, not a receipt. We take the share of $, $$, $$$ and $$$$ bars our editors track in each city, weight them one through four, and rescale to a 0 to 100 figure. It measures how expensive the rooms are, which is the part of a night out you cannot control once you pick the city.
We label it as a venue-tier index on purpose. A clean, comparable count of actual local-currency drink prices across 176 cities does not exist in any single trustworthy source, so we report what we can defend from our own dataset and sense check the direction against independent cost indexes below.
Independent measures put the same cities near the top. Singapore, Zurich and Dubai rank among the world's most expensive cities for the wealthy in the Julius Baer lifestyle index, with Dubai climbing to seventh globally per Engel and Voelkers and Singapore holding the top spot per IDN Financials. City-level drink prices track the same pattern in the crowdsourced Numbeo draft-beer index and the annual Mercer Cost of Living ranking.
"The difference between the priciest and the cheapest city in our index is 25.8 points. Pick the city and you have already set the bar tab."
If the bill matters, the cheap end of the table rewards you. Krakow, Copenhagen, Houston and Amsterdam all sit below 62, and a good cocktail bar there still pours world class. The top of the table, Dubai, Marrakech, Seoul and Singapore, is where a single round can match a meal, so plan the night around one or two standout rooms rather than a crawl.
For the cheapest cities laid out in full, see our State of Nightlife 2026 report and the price split behind it in Craft Beer vs Cocktails. To browse by city, start with the full city index or jump to London cocktail bars.
Dataset. barsforkings.com master index, bars-master-72-cities.csv. Sample size 3,631 bars across 176 cities. Field used: price_tier ($ to $$$$). Pulled June 2026.
Method. Each bar is weighted $=1, $$=2, $$$=3, $$$$=4. The city mean is rescaled to a 0 to 100 index. This is a venue price-tier index, a measure of how expensive the bars are, not a survey of local-currency drink prices, and is labeled as such.
External sources. Direction sense-checked against the Julius Baer lifestyle index (via Engel and Voelkers and IDN Financials), the Numbeo draft-beer index, and the Mercer Cost of Living ranking, all linked inline. No local-currency price was attributed to a city without a cited source.
Tom Callahan covers craft beer, live music and value bars worldwide for barsforKings. He tracks what a round actually costs from Krakow to Dubai.
Dubai tops the barsforKings 2026 Drinks Price Index at 84.8 of 100, the priciest of 176 cities, followed by Marrakech at 82.5 and Seoul at 80.0. The index reflects the price tier of the bars we track in each city.
Krakow is the cheapest in the index at 59.0, ahead of Copenhagen and Houston. A strong cocktail bar in these cities still pours well below the prices of the top-ranked cities.
We weight every tracked bar by its price tier ($=1 to $$$$=4), average per city, and rescale to 0 to 100. It is a venue price-tier index across 3,631 bars, not a survey of local drink prices, and we label it that way.
Yes on direction. Singapore, Zurich and Dubai also rank near the top of the Julius Baer lifestyle index, the Numbeo draft-beer index and Mercer's Cost of Living ranking, which we cite inline.
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