Where Data Tells the Story
© Voronoi 2026. All rights reserved.
With more than 140 million sold worldwide—one for every 58 people on Earth—the IKEA Billy Bookcase remains one of the company’s best-selling products. Introduced in 1979, the affordable six-shelf unit is available in every IKEA store and is sold flat-packed. Its global ubiquity inspired Bloomberg to create the Billy Bookcase Index in 2017 as a standardized way to compare economies. The Index specifically tracks the 6-shelf unit in the color white. (Non-white colors like wood effects oak, birch or walnut may vary the price; white is usually the cheapest color). The index is similar in spirit to The Economist’s Big Mac Index and others like the Starbucks Latte, Coca-Cola or iPhone Index. The Billy Bookcase Index, however, has no baseline country and simply shows relative price differences, giving a practical view of purchasing power parity (PPP).
This map shows the current price based on each country’s IKEA website, with prices sampled on 21 August, 2026. The bookcase will cost you as low as $57 in the Philippines and Japan to a high of $114 in Morocco and the Dominican Republic. Even within the eurozone, costs vary from $58 to $90. In Sweden, IKEA’s home country and a major manufacturing hub, it sells for $74—higher than in much of Europe. In addition to Sweden, the bookcase is produced in Slovakia, Germany, and China.
While IKEA’s business philosophy is to be as low-priced as possible, each market sets its own bookcase price based on local conditions: transportation and logistics, real estate and labor costs, taxes and tariffs, exchange rates, retail competitors, consumer purchasing power, and inflation.
IKEA operates through a franchise system in which Inter IKEA Systems B.V. owns the brand and concept, while independent franchisees (including the largest, Ingka Group) run the stores in each market. Each franchisee pays a fixed 3% fee on sales, so they can set their own prices accordingly. Ingka Group operates 29 markets and the remaining markets are operated by a mix of ten other franchisees.
The map covers all of IKEA’s current markets which include 59 countries plus Puerto Rico and Hong Kong/Macau. In March 2022, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, IKEA paused and later fully exited the Russian market, closing all stores there and related operations in Belarus.
Shelf unit size: 80 × 28 × 202 cm (31.5 × 11 × 79.5 in.)