Sofia Prices in 2026: What Things Cost

Sofia has a name for being cheap, and for a British visitor it mostly earns it. A half-litre of draught beer costs about €3.50, a metro ride €0.80 and the city's most famous cathedral nothing at all. I live here and pay these prices every week, so this is what things cost in 2026, in euros with the pound beside them, plus three worked budgets for a weekend.

Is Sofia expensive for UK visitors?

No. Most everyday things in Sofia cost around half what they do at home: a pint is about €3.50 against a UK pub average of £5.34, a cappuccino averages €3.13, and a ride anywhere on the metro is €0.80. I convert at £1 to about €1.20, the rate on 2 November 2026, and every pound figure in this post uses it.

Two things push the bill up. The first is your bed: a hotel room is the one thing in Sofia that costs close to UK prices. The second is where you sit, because a beer on a terrace on Vitosha Boulevard, the main shopping street, costs more than the same beer two streets back.

Sofia prices at a glance

These are the prices I'd plan around in 2026. Ranges run from a plain local place to the city average.

How much is a pint in Sofia?

A half-litre of draught Bulgarian lager costs about €3.50 on average in Sofia, which is about £2.90. In a plain neighbourhood bar or a park cafe it drops to about €2, while a small 0.33 litre bottle of imported beer costs about €4.

Bars here pour by the half-litre, so a "pint" in Sofia is 500 ml, a little under a British pint of 568 ml. The average UK pub pint was £5.34 in April 2026 and London's average £6.55, so a Sofia half-litre costs a little over half the UK price. The usual beers on tap are Zagorka, Kamenitza and Shumensko, all pale lagers, and Bulgarian beer also runs to darker bottles such as Kamenitza's dark.

From a shop, a half-litre bottle of Bulgarian beer costs about €1, and every corner shop keeps it in the fridge.

Wine, rakia and coffee prices

Bulgarian wine is where I save most. A mid-range bottle from a shop or supermarket costs about €6.60, and that buys a decent Mavrud or Melnik red.

Rakia, the fruit brandy Bulgarians drink before dinner, comes in a small glass of up to 50 ml and is sipped with a salad. On a mehana (tavern) menu I skip the aged and branded bottles and order the house rakia.

Coffee costs €2 to €3 in a local cafe. On a weekday I grab an espresso from a kiosk counter at the bottom of that range, and at the weekend I sit down in one of my favourite cafes, where a cappuccino costs nearer €3. A Coke costs about €2.10 in a cafe, and a small bottle of water with a meal about €1.50.

What food costs in Sofia

Breakfast is the cheapest meal of the day. A slab of banitsa, the filo and white cheese pastry, comes hot from a bakery counter wrapped in paper, and with a carton of ayran (a salty yoghurt drink) it fills you up until lunch for a few euros.

From Monday to Friday, many restaurants chalk up an обедно меню (obedno menyu), a daily lunch menu of soup and a main cooked that morning, for about €6 to €7. A casual sit-down lunch from the full menu costs €8 to €10.

Dinner in a simple restaurant costs €15 to €20 a head before drinks. Mine almost always starts with a shopska salad, the tomato, cucumber and grated white cheese starter. Three courses for two in a mid-range restaurant come to about €60 without wine.

Fast food is poor value here: a McDonald's meal costs about €10.50, more than the soup-and-main set lunch.

In a sit-down restaurant I leave about 10% for good service, the usual rule for tipping in Bulgaria. At a bakery counter, nobody expects a tip.

Public transport and taxi prices

The easy way to pay on Sofia's metro, buses and trams is to tap a contactless bank card on the validator on board or at the metro barriers. Each tap buys a Ticket 30 plus for €0.80, which lets you change between them within 30 minutes, and the taps stop charging at €2 a day for daytime travel.

The Sofia metro M4 line starts beside Terminal 2 at the airport. For a late night out I buy the 24-hour card instead of tapping, because it covers the night buses too.

A licensed taxi in Sofia is the other bargain: it starts at about €1.50 and charges about €0.75 a kilometre by day, a little more between 10pm and 6am, so a 4 km hop across the centre comes to about €4.50. From the airport, a metered taxi to the centre costs about €13 to €14, while getting from Sofia Airport to the city centre by metro costs €0.80 and takes about 20 minutes. Uber doesn't run here; Bulgarians book through local taxi apps or by phone.

What sights and museums cost

Sofia's most famous sight, Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, charges nothing to go in, and neither do the Roman streets of Serdica in the metro concourse, the Rotunda of St George, the Russian Church or the hot mineral taps.

The Museum of Socialist Art closes on Mondays, and from November to April so does the Museum of the History of Sofia inside the Central Mineral Baths, so I keep a Monday for the free churches. If you want four of the city history museum's sites in a week, its combined ticket costs €11.

Boyana Church and the synagogue top my Sofia list at €10 each, and Boyana is still the one I'd never skip. It lets in 9 people at a time for up to 10 minutes, and it's free on the last Monday of each month after 3pm, on 18 May, 17 September and 1 November.

Hotel and hostel prices in Sofia

A double room in a Sofia hotel averaged about €108 (£90) a night when I checked on 2 November 2026. November is the cheapest month, at about €73 (£61), and January the dearest, at about €146 (£122). A three-star room on a quiet weekend can drop to about €30.

Hostels are much cheaper: dorm beds run from about €5 to €13 a night, and the best hostels in Sofia also have private rooms for couples. Wherever you sleep, I'd pay a little more to stay in central Sofia, because a room near Serdika metro puts Nevsky, Serdica and the mineral taps within walking distance and saves on taxis.

What day trips from Sofia cost

I do every day trip from Sofia by bus, train, taxi or hire car, and these are the fares for the three I'd start with.

Rila Monastery is my favourite day out in Bulgaria. The direct bus has stopped, so I drive, or take the bus to Blagoevgrad and agree the taxi fare there before I get in.

For a Plovdiv day trip I take the bus, which costs €3 to €5 more than the train and gets there sooner, with no change.

What a weekend in Sofia costs: my three budgets

These are per person for two nights, Friday evening to Sunday, sharing a double room (a dorm bed on the shoestring), with flights left out.

The shoestring day of food is a €2 coffee, an €8 weekend lunch and a €15 dinner. Mid-range swaps those for a coffee and pastry, a €10 lunch and half of a €60 three-course dinner for two. The comfortable column spends the extra on a better room and taxis, and keeps the same €45 a day for food.

Flights from the UK to Sofia come on top and take about 3 hours from Stansted, Luton, Bristol, Birmingham and Liverpool. My perfect weekend in Sofia fits the mid-range column. The shoestring column drops further if you do Sofia on a budget: banitsa from a bakery counter, beer from the shop and a free day walking on Vitosha.

Old prices in leva: the euro switch

Bulgaria switched to the euro on 1 January 2026, at a fixed rate of 1.95583 leva to €1. Leva and euros were both accepted for January, and the lev stopped being legal tender on 1 February 2026. Shops showed prices in both currencies for a year from 8 August 2025, so you may still see old leva tags in photos and older blog posts.

Any price you read in leva needs dividing by 1.95583. That turns a 5-leva beer into €2.56, a 10-leva main course into €5.11, and the old 1.60-lev metro ticket into €0.82, almost exactly today's €0.80.

If you still have leva from an old trip, banks and some post offices swapped them free until 30 June 2026. They can charge a fee now, and they keep swapping until at least 31 December 2026, while the Bulgarian National Bank swaps them free with no deadline. Cards, cash machines and the rest of money in Bulgaria work the same as anywhere in the eurozone.