What it costs to build an Ultra League team in Pokémon GO

Every figure below is the real cost of taking a level-20 catch — what a wild encounter usually gives you — up to the level its best Ultra League spread needs. Ranked at levels up to 50 — without Best Buddy. 649 of the 655 cost anything at all, cheapest first; the other 6 are already there.

Powering up costs the same for every species: what differs is the level a spread has to reach, and under a CP cap that is decided by how big the Pokémon is. So the real question is not how much, it is whether the build crosses level 40 — past that, Stardust stops being the problem and XL candy starts. Of these 655 builds:

• 6 peak at or below level 20 — a wild catch is already there, and the CP cap is what holds them back, not Stardust. They are listed at the end, out of the way of the prices.
• 370 stop before level 40: Stardust and ordinary candy, no XL.
• 279 (43%) cross into XL candy, up to 296 XL and 475,000 Stardust — the price of level 50, and the same for every Pokémon that needs it.
• 78 of the 150 Pokémon PvPoke ranks in its top 150 here need XL candy (52%) — the ones anyone actually builds have a table of their own, below.
• Of the 279 builds that need XL, 6 are raid-only species — marked raid in the XL column, and farmed in bulk on a raid day rather than one catch at a time.

So 376 of 655 are buildable without a single XL candy.