What Fish and Chips Actually Costs in Australia

By Ryan Ryan built and maintains Fish and Chips Near Me, the directory this analysis draws on. More about the site and how we collect the data.

Ask anyone what a feed of fish and chips should cost and you will get a confident answer, usually anchored to whatever their local shop charged some years ago. Actual national figures are harder to find, because nobody publishes them.

So we built them. We collected the full itemised menu, with prices, for 561 of the 2,125 fish and chip shops listed in this directory, then parsed 34,387 individual menu lines and priced every product we could match cleanly. What follows is the result, with the sample size printed beside every single figure.

Where a state cut fell below 12 shops we have left it blank and written “insufficient sample” rather than printing a number to fill the table. Several rows below are empty for that reason. A figure built on four shops would look like an answer without being one.

Two things surprised us. The first is that the gap between city and country prices is almost nothing. The second is the size of the hamburger gap between Victoria and New South Wales, which is larger than any fish price gap in the dataset.

The headline numbers

These are national medians across every shop in our menu sample. The median is the middle price, so half of shops charge less and half charge more. We use the median rather than the average because a handful of premium seafood restaurants would otherwise drag the average upward and misrepresent what a normal shop charges.

A word on the last two rows. Seafood baskets and family packs contain wildly different things from shop to shop, so the median tells you what the item is typically labelled at rather than what you get for the money. Family packs in our sample run from $21.80 to $100.00.

What a normal order comes to

If you order one piece of flake, a minimum chips and a potato cake, the combined median comes to $18.80.

That figure is built from three separate medians added together, so it is indicative rather than a measured transaction. No single shop in our sample was observed charging exactly $18.80 for that combination. It is a useful benchmark for judging whether your local is dear or cheap, and nothing more precise than that.

Swap to the New South Wales and Queensland vocabulary, one piece of flake plus a small chips plus a potato scallop, and the same calculation gives $19.40. That is a comparison of item names rather than of states: as the flake section below shows, only two New South Wales menus in our sample price flake at all, so the flake component of that basket is still being carried by Victorian, South Australian and Tasmanian shops.

Fish prices, state by state

This is where the sample sizes start to matter, so we have printed them in every cell and marked any cut we consider too small to publish.

Flake

The empty rows here are a finding rather than a gap. Flake is barely a New South Wales word and almost absent from Western Australian menus, even though Western Australian shops sell the same species. We covered that separately in our piece on what Australians call the fish in their fish and chips. For pricing purposes, treat flake as a Victorian, South Australian, Tasmanian and Queensland product.

South Australia comes in cheapest of the three publishable states at $9.50, and Queensland dearest at $12.80. We are not going to guess at why.

Barramundi

Barramundi is the widest-sampled fish in the survey and shows the clearest state gradient of any single item: a $4.25 spread between the Victorian and Western Australian medians.

Snapper

Whiting

Whiting is the only fish in the survey that Queensland shops price below their Victorian counterparts. On flake, barramundi and snapper, Queensland is the dearer of the two.

Chips

Chips are the hardest item to compare, because shops use at least four different naming systems and there is no standard portion. We priced each label separately rather than pretending they are the same product.

“Minimum chips” is itself a regional term. Of the 561 menus we read, 71 of the 194 Victorian menus use it (37 per cent) and 26 of the 90 Western Australian menus (29 per cent), against 1 of 89 in New South Wales. If the phrase sounds odd to you, that is probably where you live.

Minimum chips by state, where the sample allows:

Large chips are the most comparable size across the country, and they land close together: New South Wales $12.00 (n=19), Victoria $12.00 (n=59), Queensland $11.00 (n=28), Western Australia $11.00 (n=22).

Potato cakes, potato scallops and dim sims

The two potato items are the same food under different names, and which name a shop uses is determined almost entirely by which state it trades in. That means the state tables have zeroes in them that are linguistic rather than economic.

Potato cake, national median $1.90 across 159 shops. Victoria $1.85 (n=139). Every other state falls below our publication threshold, because the term is barely used outside Victoria and Tasmania.

Potato scallop, national median $2.00 across 197 shops:

Put those two together and the fried potato disc costs between $1.70 and $2.20 whatever you call it and wherever you buy it. It is the most price-stable item in the survey.

Dim sims are not.

A dim sim in Perth costs about 51 per cent more than a dim sim in Melbourne. On a per-item basis that is the widest state spread anywhere in this survey.

The hamburger gap

The single largest state difference we found is not a fish at all.

A plain hamburger from a fish and chip shop costs $4.00 more in New South Wales than in Victoria at the median, a difference of 53 per cent. The two cuts are not equally strong: Victoria rests on 93 shops and New South Wales on 16. Sixteen clears the 12-shop floor we use throughout this survey, but it is close to it, so treat the direction and the rough size of the gap as the finding and the exact figure as provisional. We have no explanation for it and we are not going to invent one, but it is a large difference in our data and we would be interested to hear from shop operators about what sits behind it.

The fish burger, by contrast, is priced far more consistently: New South Wales $12.00 (n=39), South Australia $11.00 (n=16), Queensland $13.00 (n=82), Victoria $13.50 (n=100), Western Australia $14.05 (n=26).

City versus country

We expected regional shops to be dearer, on the theory that freight and smaller volumes push costs up. Our data does not support that, and it does not really support the opposite either.

We split every shop by great-circle distance from its state capital’s central business district, treating anything within 50 kilometres as a capital city area. That is a rough proxy for the metropolitan area rather than an official boundary.

Eight of the sixteen items above are dearer outside the capitals, five are cheaper, and three are identical to the cent. On the staples, flake and chips and a potato cake, there is effectively no city premium at all. Whatever drives the price of fish and chips in Australia, distance from a capital city is not doing much of the work.

Where the cheap and dear ends sit

Medians hide the spread, so here is the full range for a few items where we have enough shops to show it honestly.

• Flake: $7.50 to $18.00. The middle half of shops sit between $9.90 and $12.50.
• Barramundi: $8.50 to $48.90. The middle half sit between $11.23 and $15.55. The top of that range is a seafood restaurant rather than a suburban chip shop.
• Large chips: $5.50 to $23.00, middle half $10.00 to $13.99.
• Dim sim: $0.90 to $5.50, middle half $1.80 to $2.62.
• Family pack: $21.80 to $100.00, middle half $52.60 to $70.00.

If your local charges above the 75th percentile figure, you are paying at the dearer end of the national distribution. That is not automatically bad value, since portion size and fish quality vary, but it is a reference point that did not exist before.

How we compiled this

The dataset. This article reports a point-in-time survey, not a live count. In May 2026 we collected and refreshed business details for the fish and chip shop listings published in this directory, across all eight Australian states and territories, drawn from Google business listings categorised as fish and chip shops. In August 2026 we removed 31 of those listings after checking them individually, because their own primary category showed they were kebab shops, pizza shops, bakeries and the like rather than fish and chip shops. Every figure in this article has been recomputed over the 2,125 listings that remain. The directory itself changes as shops open, close and are added, so the number of listings today will not be exactly 2,125.

The menu sample. Of those 2,125 shops, 561 publish an itemised menu with prices in a form we could read and parse. That is 26.4 per cent of the directory. The state breakdown of the menu sample is New South Wales 89, Victoria 194, Queensland 141, Western Australia 90, South Australia 28, Tasmania 13, Australian Capital Territory 6, Northern Territory 0.

How prices were matched. We parsed 34,387 menu lines. An item was counted only when its name described a clean single unit of a tracked product. Anything containing pack, combo, meal, deal, family, kids, box, basket, half, twin or a numeric quantity was excluded, so a line reading “2 pieces of flake and chips” never enters the flake price. Where a shop lists the same product more than once, that shop contributes its own median, so every shop counts once per product and a large menu cannot outweigh a small one.

Limitations you should know about. Four of them matter.

1. The 561 shops with a published online menu are not a random sample of Australian fish and chip shops. They skew towards larger and better-resourced operators. Read this as a survey of shops that publish a menu online.
2. Prices are as published on each shop’s own menu at the time of collection in May
3. Menus go stale. Ring ahead if the price matters to you.
4. Portion sizes are not standardised anywhere in this industry. A $10.50 piece of flake in one shop is not necessarily the same amount of fish as a $10.50 piece in another.
5. Any cut with fewer than 12 shops is marked insufficient sample and no figure is given. We would rather print a gap than a number nobody should rely on.

Population figures, where used elsewhere in our research, come from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, National, state and territory population, December 2024, released 19 June 2025.

Corrections. If you operate a shop in this directory and a price here misstates your menu, tell us via our contact page and we will update the listing and re-run the analysis. The same goes for opening hours, phone numbers or anything else we have wrong about your business. Our editorial and data policy sets out where these figures come from, what we do not measure, and how we handle corrections.

Browse fish and chip shops by state: Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania, Australian Capital Territory, Northern Territory.