Bulgaria — Regional Market index
The Bulgaria regional market index lists the 11 Bulgarian markets that meet the co-location system's composition gates. Bulgaria publishes its entire qualifying pool: all 11 markets that cleared a composition gate are in the published set, with none held back by the 400-market continental cap.
Coverage
No rank or score is published for any market in this table. Every market below qualifies under the framework's Regional Market composition gate — a hypermarket anchor paired with at least two of {hardware, price club, lifestyle, electronics, sport} across the market's co-location clusters. Full methodology: Regional Markets Intelligence System.
The metropolitan reference point recorded for each market is the nearest major metropolitan centre in the framework's continental reference set — a straight-line (crow-flies) distance measurement, not a drive-time or commuting estimate. It is not a claim that the market functions as a commuter suburb of that centre. Ten of Bulgaria's 11 reference points sit within the country — Varna for four entries, and Plovdiv and Sofia for three each. Only Ruse, on the Danube, references a centre across a border, to Bucharest, Romania, 66 kilometres away. Bulgaria's median reference distance is 79 kilometres and no market sits beyond 140 kilometres from its reference point.
Catchment population has not been computed for any of the 11 Bulgarian markets in the current dataset build — Bulgaria is one of six European countries without this figure in the 2026-08-07 release, alongside Croatia, Finland, Norway, Romania, and Sweden. This is a disclosed gap in the underlying source data, stated plainly rather than presented as zero.
Cluster composition
The 11 markets carry 11 co-location clusters between them — 11 Tier 1, and no Tier 2 or Tier 3 clusters at all. Bulgaria is the only country in either continental set where every market qualifies on exactly one Tier 1 cluster and nothing else.
Markets
This table is a country-specific view of the continental Top 400 Regional Markets — Europe set.
The dataset records Bulgarian market names in Cyrillic. They appear here in standard Latin transliteration, matching the Latin forms the dataset itself carries in its market identifiers.
| Market | Metropolitan reference | km | T1 | T2 | T3 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pernik | Sofia | 25.1 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Pazardzhik | Plovdiv | 33.3 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Dobrich | Varna | 39.5 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Vratsa | Sofia | 58.3 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Ruse | Bucharest (Romania) | 66.2 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Shumen | Varna | 79.2 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Stara Zagora | Plovdiv | 81.1 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Burgas | Varna | 84.3 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Veliko Tarnovo | Plovdiv | 126.5 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Pleven | Sofia | 132.6 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Yambol | Varna | 139.4 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
See also
- Top 400 Regional Markets — Europe — the continental European Top 400 table this page filters
- Regional Markets intelligence system — the co-location methodology and market selection criteria