Is that a normal price for a burger?
What pub food costs in Australia
Median prices for the dishes on almost every Australian pub menu — parma, schnitzel, burger, fish and chips, calamari — with the sample size behind each figure.
Ten dishes appear on almost every pub menu in the country. Here is what each of them actually costs, measured across 10,412 priced menu rows.
| Dish | Median | Middle half | Venues |
|---|---|---|---|
| Steak sandwich | $26 | $18.50–$29 | 174 |
| Chicken parma | $25.90 | $20–$30 | 480 |
| Caesar salad | $21 | $16–$24.50 | 225 |
| Schnitzel | $20.50 | $15–$28 | 593 |
| Margherita pizza | $20 | $15.60–$24 | 517 |
| Salt and pepper calamari | $19.99 | $16–$25 | 1,266 |
| Burger | $18 | $14.95–$23 | 1,455 |
| Fish and chips | $18 | $14–$25 | 440 |
| Chicken wings | $17.20 | $13–$20 | 791 |
| Garlic bread | $10 | $8–$13.95 | 833 |
What this tells you
The dearest of the ten is the steak sandwich at $26; the cheapest is garlic bread at $10. The useful number is not the median but the spread: a dish whose middle half spans ten dollars is one where the venue matters far more than the dish does.
Where it is dearest
State-by-state medians for the two dishes with the largest samples:
| State | burger | salt and pepper calamari |
|---|---|---|
| Australian Capital Territory | $18 | — |
| New South Wales | $18 | $20 |
| Northern Territory | $24 | — |
| Queensland | $17.99 | $17.90 |
| South Australia | $18 | $24.90 |
| Tasmania | $21.95 | $23 |
| Victoria | $18 | $20 |
| Western Australia | $21.90 | $19 |
How this was measured
Each dish is matched by name and by menu section, because for a large share of venues the scrape recorded the dish as the section (“Chicken Parmi”) and the size as the item (“Large”). Medians rather than averages, and prices below 40% or above 250% of a dish’s own median are excluded as add-ons and share platters rather than portions of the dish.
A state appears only where it has at least 40 priced examples. Recomputed from the latest catalogue export.