Inflation Calculator

01Calculate Inflation

Enter an amount and pick the two years to compare. "To" defaults to the latest month of CPI data.

02About This Calculator

This inflation calculator uses historical Consumer Price Index (CPI) data to determine the equivalent buying power of money across different years. The calculator spans from 1774 to the present day, allowing you to see how inflation has affected the value of the dollar over more than two centuries.

The official Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U starts in 1913. Figures for 1774 to 1912 come from historical price-index reconstructions linked to the CPI-U, built by economic historians from scattered commodity prices and cost-of-living records rather than a survey, so treat results for those years as rough estimates, not to-the-penny values. Results that involve a year before 1913 are rounded to two significant figures and marked as estimates.

03How It Works

The calculator uses conversion factors based on CPI data to determine how much money from one year would be worth in another year's dollars. For example, $100 in 1950 had significantly more buying power than $100 today due to inflation over the decades. The equivalent amount is the amount times the "To" year's factor divided by the "From" year's factor.

Every year from 1913 to 2025 uses that year's annual average CPI-U (1913 to 2024 at the full precision BLS publishes); years before 1913 use the historical estimates described below. For 2026, the value is the latest monthly CPI-U (US city average, not seasonally adjusted) published by the BLS when the table was last updated: September 2026, index 336.940; the table is refreshed after each monthly CPI release, so a result that ends in 2026 can change slightly from month to month.

Cumulative inflation is the percentage change in prices between the two years. Average annual inflation is the compound yearly rate that produces the same change. An annual average sits at the middle of its year, so when the latest month is the endpoint the span is measured to the middle of that month (for example, 1950 to September 2026 counts 76.21 years).

04Data Sources

• 1913 onward: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U), US city average, all items, 1982-84 = 100. bls.gov/cpi. Factors are each year's annual average divided by the 2024 annual average (313.689).
• 1800 to 1912: the historical consumer price series published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, originally compiled by the BLS for its Handbook of Labor Statistics (an index of prices paid by Vermont farmers for family living for 1800-1851, Ethel D. Hoover's consumer price index for 1851-1890 and Albert Rees's cost-of-living index for 1890-1912), linked to the CPI-U. minneapolisfed.org. The Minneapolis Fed itself says these years should be treated as estimates.
• 1774 to 1799: earlier reconstructions of colonial and early-republic prices from economic historians, linked to the later series. These are the roughest figures on the page; the Revolutionary War years in particular reflect wartime currency inflation and vary a lot between historians' estimates.

05Share Your Results

After calculating, use the toolbar under the result to copy a link that reopens this exact comparison, download the comparison as an image, download the year-by-year series as a CSV file, or print a clean copy. Older links that only carry an amount and a starting year still open the comparison to the latest month.