TASMAC price list 2026: what a bottle actually costs
The price is fixed by law and it is the same in every shop in Tamil Nadu — Chennai, Coimbatore, a village counter in Ariyalur. What changes is whether you know the number before someone says it to you. Here are the real bands, from the live catalogue rather than a PDF from two years ago.
One price, the whole state
This is the part worth internalising: TASMAC sells at a government-fixed MRP, and that MRP does not move from district to district. The same 180 ml brandy is the same rupees in T. Nagar and in a shop off a highway three hundred kilometres away. There is no local pricing, no premium for a busy outlet, no "this branch charges more".
The only legitimate addition is the ₹10 refundable bottle deposit, collected on top of the MRP and paid back when you return the empty. So the arithmetic at the counter is simply MRP + ₹10. A ₹230 bottle is ₹240. Anything above that is not the deposit — it is an overcharge, and it is worth knowing the difference. We wrote up how the deposit works separately.
What a quarter costs
The 180 ml quarter is how most of Tamil Nadu buys. Across the live catalogue, this is where each category actually sits — the cheapest available, and the median, which is a better guide to what you will meet on a shelf than the extremes.
| Category | Cheapest quarter | Typical (median) | Dearest quarter |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wine | ₹90 | ₹125 | ₹220 |
| Rum | ₹140 | ₹170 | ₹280 |
| Brandy | ₹140 | ₹210 | ₹670 |
| Vodka | ₹170 | ₹250 | ₹310 |
| Whisky | ₹140 | ₹260 | ₹650 |
| Gin | ₹140 | ₹310 | ₹790 |
Two things fall out of that table. ₹140 is the floor for a quarter of spirits — brandy, whisky, rum and gin all start there, so the cheapest quarter of anything strong is the same price whatever you choose. And rum is the cheapest way up: its median quarter is ₹170 against whisky's ₹260, which is most of why the rum belt looks the way it does.
What a full bottle costs
For the 750 ml bottle — 886 of them in the catalogue — the spread is wider and the middle is what matters:
Half of all full bottles fall between ₹1,390 and ₹3,040. The cheapest 750 ml in the whole state is a fortified wine at ₹360; the cheapest full bottle of spirits is a rum at ₹560.
The cheapest way to drink, measured properly
Per rupee of liquid, nothing in TASMAC beats strong beer in the 650 ml bottle. At ₹130–₹150 a bottle that works out to roughly ₹200–₹230 per litre, against about ₹800/L for the cheapest brandy quarter. If the question is volume for money, that is the answer, and it is not close.
The per-litre view also settles the oldest queue argument. A Full is usually cheaper per litre than a Quarter — but only if you were going to drink the Full. We did the arithmetic across the catalogue in Quarter vs Full.
Why the lists you find online are wrong
Search for a TASMAC price list and you will mostly find PDFs and scraped tables, many of them years old, several of them copies of each other. The official list is revised periodically, and when it moves, every one of those pages is quietly wrong — with no indication of when it was last true.
That is the whole reason Sarakku exists. The app carries all 1,498 products and 2,076 bottle sizes on the phone, so the legal price answers with no signal at all, and it updates when the official list does. A page cannot do that; a printed sheet certainly cannot.
What to remember at the counter: the price is fixed statewide, the only addition is ₹10, and it comes back when you return the bottle.
Knowing the number is step one. If the counter asks for more than it, here is exactly where to report it — and what to photograph before you walk away.
Prices here are from the catalogue as it stands on 31 August 2026. They are the law, not an estimate — but the law gets revised, which is exactly why we would rather you checked the app than trusted this page a year from now.