On Monday 4 May 2026, Luxembourg’s Ministry of the Economy published the latest edition its “4 Borders Study”, a comparative analysis of consumer retail prices (including all taxes) for identical products in large food retail outlets across the Greater Region.

According to the Ministry of the Economy, the main objective of the study is to analyse the price competitiveness of the national retail offering in order to assess whether sales prices in Luxembourg are attractive for the end consumer compared with those applied in neighbouring areas in Belgium, France and Germany.

The study is limited to a strictly price-competitiveness approach and does not take into account other factors that may influence retail prices (e.g. the level of various taxes included in the sale price, wages, commercial rents, territorial supply restrictions, etc.) or consumer behaviour (e.g. purchasing power, brand reputation and product range, opening hours, transport costs, etc.).

The ministry detailed that consumer prices for the products were collected in November 2025 by an internationally recognised company specialising in market intelligence and price surveys. In total, 25 retail chains located in Luxembourg and in areas close to the border in neighbouring countries were surveyed. Overall, the compiled database includes more than 148,000 individual products, covering around 100 product families which are classified into five distinct categories (groceries, beverages, drugstore–perfumery–hygiene products, fresh produce and non-food items).

The ministry emphasised that the cross-border comparison of consumer prices is a complex exercise and is based on a specific methodology built on the identification of sets of identical common products and the calculation of average price indices as a reference unit. It said the limitations of this methodology must be taken into account when interpreting the results.

The ministry highlighted two general observations which emerged from the most recent analyses:

• the retail offering in the Greater Region is highly heterogeneous and diverse; the range of available products varies significantly from country to country and also between retail chains;

• there are differences in consumer prices within the Greater Region, not only between the four countries but also between different retail chains within the same country, both for individual products and at the aggregated level of the hundred product families and the five categories. In each chain and in each country, some products are cheaper than those offered by competitors, while for others the opposite is true.

More specifically, the study showed the following results for Luxembourg:

• for products available in at least two retail chains in Luxembourg and in at least one of the three neighbouring countries, Luxembourg records a price index of 101.0. Across all categories, prices in Luxembourg are therefore on average very close to the Greater Region average;

• the “pairwise” analysis, which compares Luxembourg individually with each of its three neighbouring countries, showed that Luxembourg has, on average, a price advantage compared with Belgium, but a disadvantage compared with France and Germany;

• a more detailed analysis at the level of individual retail chains included in the sample of large food retailers nuances these findings: some chains in Luxembourg are, on average, cheaper than the Greater Region average, while others are more expensive. This observation applied both at the aggregated level (all categories and products combined) and for each of the five individual categories;

• in addition, the sample includes several retail chains belonging to the same group and operating across multiple countries in the Greater Region. For Luxembourg, the analysis shows that in six out of eight cases, the chains located in Luxembourg have lower prices than their counterparts abroad (across all categories).

The full study can be found at https://meco.gouvernement.lu/fr/publications.html