US Inflation Calculator

What this inflation calculator does

Your grandfather earned 4,000 a year and thought it was decent money. Somebody in an old news story paid 12,000 for a house. A pension promises a fixed 30,000 a year for life. None of those numbers mean anything until you translate them into money you understand.

That translation is what this does. Enter an amount, pick the year it belonged to, pick the year you want it expressed in, and it returns the equivalent value.

It works in both directions. Forwards to see what an old sum is worth now, or backwards to see what today's money would have been worth in the past. Both are useful and the second one is the more interesting of the two.

Everything runs in your browser using published Consumer Price Index data. Nothing typed here is stored or sent anywhere.

How to use it

1. Enter amount. The sum you want to convert.
2. In year. The year that amount belonged to.
3. To year. The year you want it expressed in.

Press Calculate. Press Reset to clear it.

Both dropdowns default to 1914, so remember to set the second one or you will convert a year into itself and get your own number back.

The years available run from 1914 to 2024, which is a long run and stops short of the present. The next section explains what to do about that.

The data ends at 2024, and what that means

The index built into this tool runs from 1914 through 2024. It does not yet include 2025 or 2026.

So if you are converting an old amount into "today's money", what you actually get is 2024 money, and prices have risen since. The CPI stood at about 313.7 as an annual average for 2024 and was around 327 by the middle of 2026, which is roughly 4 percent of additional inflation the tool cannot see.

Practically, that means any figure you convert to 2024 is understated by about four percent against current prices. On a 100,000 conversion that is around 4,000. For getting a feel for historical values it changes nothing. For anything you are budgeting against, add the missing years yourself.

The fix is to update the table each January when the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the completed annual average, and that is on our list.

Worth mentioning one oddity in the underlying data while we are here. October 2025 CPI data was never published, because of the lapse in federal appropriations that year. It is the sort of gap that does not affect annual averages much but is a reminder that even the most routine official statistics depend on someone being funded to collect them.

The formula

Adjusted amount = original amount × (CPI in target year ÷ CPI in original year)

That is the whole thing. The Consumer Price Index is a single number for each year describing the price of a fixed basket of goods and services, set so that the 1982 to 1984 average equals 100. The ratio between any two years is how much prices moved between them.

So the index for 2024 being 314.4 means the basket cost about 3.14 times what it cost in the early 1980s. And the index for 1970 being 38.8 means it cost 38.8 percent of that same baseline.

Divide one by the other and you have your multiplier. Nothing more complicated is happening, which is why you can check any inflation calculator by hand if you have the index values.

Worked examples, both directions

Forwards. What is 100 from 1970 worth in 2024?

100 × (314.4 ÷ 38.8) = 100 × 8.103 = 810.31

A few more, and the multipliers are worth noticing on their own:

Backwards. This is the direction people forget, and it makes historical figures land properly.

100,000 in 2024 money is 12,341 in 1970 money, and 54,771 in 2000 money.

So a 2024 salary of 100,000 would have felt like about 12,000 in 1970. Which is a rather better way of understanding an old wage figure than trying to imagine what things cost.

The backwards direction is also the honest way to read historical prices you come across. A house advertised at 12,000 in 1950 is not a bargain you missed, it is roughly 165,000 in 2024 terms, which sounds a great deal more ordinary.

A century of prices in one number

The index runs from 10.0 in 1914 to 314.4 in 2024. So over 110 years, prices rose by about 3,044 percent, and a 1914 dollar buys what 31.44 dollars buy in 2024.

Put as an annual rate, that is 3.18 percent a year, compounded, for over a century.

Which is the number worth carrying around, because a bit over three percent a year sounds like nothing and is the whole story. It is the same arithmetic as compound interest and it behaves the same way: slow, unremarkable, and eventually enormous.

The path was anything but smooth. A glance down the index shows the shape of it. Prices doubled between 1914 and 1920 during the First World War. They fell through the early 1930s, from 17.2 in 1929 to 12.9 in 1933, which is a quarter of the price level gone in four years and one of the few genuine deflations in the record. The 1970s are the steepest sustained climb: 38.8 in 1970 to 82.4 in 1980, more than doubling in a decade. And 2021 to 2023 shows the most recent burst, from 271.0 to 304.7.

A useful rule of thumb falls out of it. At around 3 percent a year, prices double roughly every 24 years, which our rule of 72 calculator will confirm in one division. So over a 40 year working life, expect prices to roughly triple. Any long term plan built on fixed amounts needs to reckon with that.

What the CPI actually measures

The Consumer Price Index tracks the average change over time in the prices paid by urban consumers for a fixed basket of goods and services. Specifically this is the CPI-U, covering all urban consumers, which represents over 90 percent of the United States population.

Three things about it are worth knowing before you lean on it.

It is an average across a basket. The basket includes housing, food, transport, medical care, education, recreation and more, weighted by how much people typically spend on each. No individual buys exactly that basket.

The categories move very differently. The headline figure hides enormous divergence underneath. In recent data, energy prices moved by well over ten percent in a year while food moved around three. Averaging those produces a number that describes nobody's experience precisely.

It is revised and it is estimated. The CPI is built from a sample of prices rather than every price, so it carries sampling error, and recent months are subject to revision. For historical conversion none of this matters. For arguing about last quarter, it does.

There are other measures. The CPI-W covers urban wage earners and clerical workers, and is what several states use to index their minimum wage. The chained CPI, or C-CPI-U, allows for people substituting between goods when relative prices change, and generally runs slightly lower. Which index gets used for indexing a benefit or a tax bracket is a policy choice with real money attached.

Why your own inflation rate is different

The single most useful thing to understand about inflation figures is that the published rate is an average over a representative basket, and your own spending is not that basket.

If you rent in a city where rents are rising fast, your personal inflation rate is well above the headline. If you own your home outright and drive very little, it may be well below. A household with children in education and one without face different numbers from the same economy.

This is why the published rate so often feels wrong. It is not that it is wrong, it is that it is answering a question about the average urban consumer rather than about you.

Two practical consequences.

For pay negotiations, the headline rate is the conventional reference point and it is a floor rather than a target. A rise that matches inflation leaves you exactly where you were.

For long term planning, think about which categories your own future spending is weighted toward. Retirement spending skews heavily toward medical care, which has historically risen faster than the overall index, so planning a retirement on the headline rate may understate what you need.

And for savings, the comparison that matters is between your interest rate and inflation. Money earning 3 percent while prices rise 3.5 percent is losing purchasing power however healthy the balance looks. Our savings calculator works in nominal terms, so run its answer back through this page to see what it is really worth.

Questions people ask

How do I calculate inflation between two years?

Multiply the amount by the CPI of the later year divided by the CPI of the earlier one. 100 in 1970 becomes 100 times 314.4 over 38.8, which is 810.31 in 2024.

Why does it stop at 2024?

The built-in index has not been updated past the 2024 annual average. Prices have risen about four percent since, so conversions to "today" are understated by roughly that much. See the section above.

Can I go backwards in time?

Yes. Put the later year in the first dropdown and the earlier one in the second. 100,000 in 2024 is about 12,341 in 1970 money.

What has the long run inflation rate been?

About 3.18 percent a year between 1914 and 2024, compounded. At that rate prices roughly double every 24 years.

Which index does this use?

The CPI-U, all urban consumers, US city average, with 1982 to 1984 set to 100. That is the standard series for this kind of conversion.

The official rate feels lower than my experience. Why?

Because it averages a basket that is not your basket. Renters, drivers and households with heavy medical or education spending routinely face a personal rate well above the headline.

Has there ever been deflation?

Yes. Prices fell by roughly a quarter between 1929 and 1933, and there were smaller declines in 1921 and 2009. The index shows all of them.

References

A note on sourcing and dates. The index used here is the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, US city average, published monthly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics with 1982 to 1984 set equal to 100. Annual averages are used. The series built into this calculator runs to 2024; for current figures, or for any conversion where the last two years matter, use the BLS release directly.

1. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index. https://www.bls.gov/cpi/
2. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U): U.S. City Average, by Expenditure Category. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.t01.htm
3. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index News Release. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cpi.pdf
4. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: All Items in U.S. City Average, FRED series CPIAUCSL. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL