Use this inflation calculator to find out what a sum of money from any year since 1913 would be worth today, based on real U.S. Consumer Price Index (CPI) data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Data source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, CPI-U (U.S. city average, all items, not seasonally adjusted), annual averages. Figures reflect BLS-published annual averages; the 2024 value is the final published annual average. Series last verified against BLS published data: January 2025.
Enter a dollar amount, the year that money was originally worth (the start year), and the year you want to compare it to (the end year). Click "Calculate Inflation" to see the equivalent buying power, the total percentage change in prices, and a year-by-year breakdown table using official CPI index values.
Inflation quietly erodes purchasing power every year, which makes comparing prices, wages, or historical events across time genuinely confusing without a tool like this. A history teacher explaining the cost of a Model T in 1925 ($260) needs to know that's roughly $4,660.69 today. A grandparent recalling a $0.15 movie ticket in 1955 is describing something worth about $1.76 now. Genealogists researching a great-grandfather's 1940 salary of $1,200 a year want to know that's around $26,888.57 in today's dollars — nearly $27,000, far more than a rough guess would suggest. Investors, economists, students, and curious readers all use inflation math to make sense of old prices, historical wages, wartime bond values, and long-term savings goals. Without adjusting for inflation, any comparison of money across decades is meaningless — a dollar in 1913 simply is not a dollar in 2024.
The calculator uses the U.S. Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U), the same index the Bureau of Labor Statistics has published since 1919 (with values calculated back to 1913). The formula is:
Adjusted Amount = Original Amount × (CPI in End Year ÷ CPI in Start Year)
The CPI tracks the average price of a fixed "basket" of goods and services — food, housing, transportation, medical care — over time. Dividing the end-year index by the start-year index gives the cumulative inflation multiplier between those two points. All figures embedded in this tool are BLS annual averages, not seasonally adjusted.
Suppose you want to know what $100 in 1970 is worth in 2024. The CPI for 1970 is 38.8, and the CPI for 2024 is 313.7.
Adjusted Amount = $100 × (313.7 ÷ 38.8) = $100 × 8.0851 = $808.51
That means $100 in 1970 had the same buying power as roughly $808.51 in 2024 — total inflation of about 708.5% over 54 years, or an average annual rate of roughly 3.95%. That's the same order of magnitude as saying a car that cost $3,000 in 1970 would sell for over $24,000 today, purely from inflation.
The price data that eventually became the Consumer Price Index began being collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics around 1913 — the same year the Federal Reserve was created — but the CPI wasn't officially published as an index until 1919, with the earlier years calculated afterward from surviving price records.
Between 1913 and 1920, prices roughly doubled due to World War I spending, then actually fell during the early 1920s and again sharply during the Great Depression, when the CPI dropped nearly 25% from 1929 to 1933.
The most extreme single-year inflation spike in this dataset was 1946–1947, when prices jumped over 14% in one year as wartime price controls were lifted.
Before the CPI existed, comparing prices across time relied on scattered wage records, merchant ledgers, and commodity price lists — often unreliable and inconsistent city to city. The BLS built the modern CPI in the years around World War I, partly to help set fair wartime wages, by sampling household budgets in industrial cities; the index was first officially published in 1919, and economists later worked backward to estimate values for 1913–1918. Ancient civilizations faced similar puzzles: Roman emperors like Diocletian issued price-control edicts in 301 CE to fight runaway inflation caused by debased silver coinage, one of history's earliest documented battles against currency devaluation. The dollar's story since 1913 — roughly a 30-fold increase in prices — mirrors that same ancient struggle between money supply, trust, and the real value of a day's wages.
An inflation calculator converts a dollar amount from one year into its equivalent purchasing power in another year, using historical price index data. It's commonly used to compare historical wages, prices, savings, and investment returns across decades.
CPI data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is considered the gold standard for measuring U.S. inflation, though methodology has been refined over the decades. It's highly reliable for broad comparisons but less precise for very specific goods or regions.
Over more than a century, cumulative inflation from wars, economic policy, oil shocks, and monetary expansion has increased average prices roughly 30-fold, meaning $1 in 1913 has the same buying power as about $30-32 today.
No — this tool only uses actual historical CPI data through 2024. Projecting future inflation requires assumptions about future economic conditions, which this calculator does not attempt to forecast.
It covers 1913, the earliest year for which annual CPI values exist, through 2024, the most recent finalized annual average published by the BLS. Note that the CPI wasn't officially published until 1919 — the 1913-1918 figures were calculated afterward from collected price records.
CPI is the most common proxy for cost of living changes, but it measures a fixed basket of goods and services rather than any one person's actual spending habits, so individual experiences of inflation can vary.
Calculator by HistoryCalc