A weird pet project I’ve been wanting to pursue for a while: figure out how much 1 Galleon is in GBP.

I made a whole spreadsheet of every instance of when a specific price was assigned to a product or service. A slight issue is that the majority are “magic only” type products…a wand costs 7 galleons and obviously there’s no frame of reference for us muggles. The best products to base it off are: hot chocolate on the Knight Bus (an extra 2 sickles on top of the 11 sickle journey) and Butterbeers ordered in the Hog’s Head (3 = 6 sickles, so 2 sickles a beer).

So a hot chocolate and a butterbeer cost roughly the same which leads me to estimate that one sickle is probably worth about £1. This makes sense to me: hot choc might be a bit pricey at £2 but this is a drink bought on a bus/train/other mode of transport where goods are typically marked up and priced higher. £2 for a butterbeer might be cheap but this is 1) 1995 when a pint was roughly £2-2.50, 2) bought at the grimey Hog’s Head where presumably drinks are cheaper to fit with their clientele, 3) butterbeer is low alcohol/non-alcoholic so would probably be slightly cheaper than a regular Hagrid mug of mead. Its also possible that its not a pint as it typically comes in bottles, so again, this would contribute to a slightly lower price point.

Given that there are 29 Knuts in a Sickle and 17 Sickles in a Galleon (“it’s easy enough”), this works out to:

1 Knut = 3p

1 Sickle = £1

1 Galleon = £17

What does this mean for some of the more interesting prices of goods we see throughout the books?

Wand = £119 – seems kind of reasonable that a wand would be expensive but affordable.

Harry Spends approximately £11.24 on candy on the Hogwarts Express. Greedy.

The Weasleys had one galleon and a ‘small pile’ of sickles in their vault in Book 2. Being generous and estimating that they had 25 sickles, would mean they had about £42 in there…they really are poor.

However, then they go ahead and win the lottery of £11,900! Sounds about enough to pay for a trip to Egypt for the whole family.

Fred and George bet £644.10 on the Quidditch World Cup, no wonder they were trying to blackmail Ludo into giving them their winnings. Don’t know what the odds were but seems like it would be in the thousands of pounds.

Some guy in the woods tries to impress a veela by claiming to be a Dragon Killer earning 100 Galleons a year. He might want to get a better job because that’s only a £1,700 salary, low for even 1995! Further, Dumbledore (in the same book) offers Dobby a salary of 10 galleons a week (520 galleons per year), meaning you can earn more scrubbing plates and prepping food at Hogwarts than you can killing dragons – £8,840. And he probably gets food and accommodation thrown in. Maybe the dragon killer forgot to mention danger pay? Dobby took less money because he still enjoys work and got a yearly £884 stipend instead.

Triwizard winnings were £17,000, enough to get a joke shop off the ground I should think.

Weirdly, the price of a Daily Prophet declines from 5 knuts (17p) in Philosopher’s Stone to just 1 knut (3p) in Order of the Phoenix. Perhaps Hagrid has a premium service and/or Hermione gets a student discount?

Advanced Potion Making is priced at £153!

Reward on Harry Potter by book 7 is 200,000 galleons according to the Snatchers, £3.4mn. No wonder Pansy Parkinson wanted to turn him over.

Aside from those salary figures and a few other quirks (Harry spent over £500 on omnioculars!), this all seems fairly accurate to me.

That being said, JK Rowling actually said in an interview that £1 = 5 galleons. Which I don’t believe is actually that accurate. Dragon Killer would make just £500 a year! And a butterbeer/hot chocolate would be like 40p. Seems a little off.

Because I love her so much, I decided to defend her. She gave this particular interview in March 2001, and did mention that the value fluctuates. Thus I’ll assume that in 2001, £1 = 5 galleons and that’s because the wizarding currency appreciated in value massively (a change of -70.6% since 1995), following the downfall of YKW. Money started flowing in from muggle investors and overseas wizards (who use different currencies) who are aware of the Wizarding World as suddenly the political and economic climate stabilised now that the greatest Dark Wizard of all time had been defeated. So there you have it.