The Hours-of-Work Price Museum

01Then and Now

Every figure on this page is a price divided by an hourly wage from the same period, so it shows how long someone had to work, before tax, to earn the money. No inflation adjustment is needed: prices and pay are both in the dollars of their own day. Pick any two years above, or the latest month, and choose whose pay to measure with. One starting year is never the whole story, so try a few: the quick picks are a good place to begin.

Further down, you can ring up the same basket on two receipts, see what a down payment, a mortgage and rent cost in hours, and test whether a summer job could pay a year of college.

02The Galleries

03What One Hour of Work Bought

The same numbers turned around: what an hour of pay would buy in a given year. Move the slider or press play. Each bar shows where that year sits against the most an hour has ever bought of that item in the data.

04The Same Basket, Two Receipts

Build a basket and see it rung up in both years, in dollars and in working time. These are illustrative baskets, not the full cost of feeding a household. If an item has no price for one of the years, it is flagged rather than quietly dropped.

05A Place to Live

Housing needs more than one number. Saving the down payment, carrying the mortgage and paying rent are different costs, and a lower house price does not mean a lower payment when interest rates are higher.

Hours of work each month at the pay level you chose (average pay when you enter your own wages). Mortgage: principal and interest only, on the median price of new houses sold, on a 30-year fixed loan at the year's average rate; taxes, insurance and maintenance are extra. Rent: Census median gross rent, which includes utilities; it comes from the census every ten years through 2000 and from the American Community Survey each year from 2009; there is no standard figure for 2020.

06Could a Summer Job Pay Tuition?

Choose a school year and a summer job, and fill the tuition bill one week of pay at a time. Tuition here is the published price of a year of in-state tuition and required fees, before grants, and leaves out room, board and books.

Share of a year of tuition and fees covered by 12 weeks of full-time work the summer before, at the federal minimum wage and at average pay. Before tax and before anything spent.

07Find the Story

Every exhibit, ranked by how much its working-time cost changed between the two years you picked.

Rent and tuition are published once a year with a delay, so the most recent years may not have a figure yet.

Average hourly pay of production and nonsupervisory workers, before tax. Items without a price in either year are left out of the ranking and listed below it.

08For the Classroom

Five exercises that work with the museum. The answers below update with the data; the comparisons use 1980 and 2025 at average pay.

1. A pound of white bread cost $0.51 in 1980, when average pay was $6.84 an hour. How many minutes of work did it take?
   Answer

   $0.51 ÷ $6.84 = 0.074 hours, or about 4.5 minutes. In 2025 it was $1.87 ÷ $31.35 = about 3.6 minutes.
2. The dollar price of bread rose 267% from 1980 to 2025. Explain how the working time can fall at the same time.
   Answer

   Pay rose 358% over the same years. When pay rises faster than a price, the item takes less work to buy even though its price went up; when the price rises faster, it takes more.
3. Switch the pay setting to the federal minimum wage. In 2025, a gallon of gasoline cost $3.26. How long did a minimum-wage worker work for it, and how does that compare with average pay?
   Answer

   $3.26 ÷ $7.25 = about 27 minutes at the federal minimum, against 6 minutes at average pay. Many states set a higher minimum than the federal rate.
4. The museum's egg price is for a dozen grade A large eggs. Name one way the same item could still change over the decades, and why that matters for comparisons.
   Answer

   Examples: the share of cage-free or organic eggs sold, the brands on the shelf, or where people shop. Average prices follow what is sold, so a shift in the mix can move the price without the same carton changing price.
5. Open the egg exhibit's full history. Why might comparing just two years tell a different story from the whole chart?
   Answer

   A single year can be unusual: in 2025 a dozen eggs took 8.1 minutes against 7.4 in 1980, and bird flu outbreaks pushed monthly egg prices to records in December 2022, January 2023 and March 2025. The annual averages in the chart smooth those peaks, and the full history shows whether a change is a trend or a spike.

09How the Museum Works

The calculation. Working time = the price of the stated quantity ÷ hourly pay in the same period (for tuition, pay in the calendar year the school year starts). The change in working time is the later time divided by the earlier time, minus one. Prices and pay are both nominal, so no inflation adjustment is involved.

Pay. The default is the Bureau of Labor Statistics' average hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees in private industry, which covers about four in five private workers and runs back to 1964. It is an average for that group, not the median for all workers, and it is before tax and before benefits. The federal minimum wage is the federal rate, averaged across each year when it changed mid-year; most states now set higher minimums, and federal coverage was narrower in the 1960s and 1970s; the rates shown are for workers covered before 1961, and newly covered workers had lower rates until 1978. With your own wages you can compare what you earned in two years, or hold one wage fixed to see prices alone.

Prices. Groceries, gasoline, electricity and natural gas are the Bureau of Labor Statistics' "U.S. city average" prices, which cover urban areas, collected for the consumer price index. They are averages of what is sold, not a fixed product, so changes in quality, sizes and the mix of brands can move them. Years count only when at least 10 of the 12 months were published; October 2025 prices for most items were never collected because of the federal government shutdown, so most 2025 averages use 11 months (gasoline has all 12; potatoes, also missing November, use 10). House prices are the Census Bureau's median price of new houses sold, mortgage rates are Freddie Mac's weekly 30-year fixed average, rent is the Census median gross rent, and tuition is from the National Center for Education Statistics.

Years and the latest month. Each year is an annual average of prices and of pay. The latest-month option compares the most recent month's prices with that month's pay and is not a full-year figure; rent and tuition have no monthly figures and are left out of it, and house prices are the most recent quarter's median. The prices and pay update each month after the consumer price index is released.

Working time is not saving time. A down payment shown as weeks of pay is gross pay before tax and before living costs; the savings-rate figure in section 05 shows how much longer saving it actually takes.

10Sources and Data

• Bureau of Labor Statistics: Average price data, via FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (series APU0000702111, APU0000709112, APU0000708111, APU0000706111, APU0000703112, APU0000704111, APU0000710212, APU0000701312, APU0000712112, APU0000712311, APU0000711211, APU0000715211, APU0000717311, APU000074714, APU000072610, APU000072620)
• BLS: Average hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees, total private (CEU0500000008)
• US Department of Labor: History of federal minimum wage rates
• Census Bureau and HUD: Median sales price of houses sold (MSPUS)
• Freddie Mac: 30-year fixed rate mortgage average (MORTGAGE30US)
• Census Bureau: Historical census of housing tables, gross rents; American Community Survey 1-year estimates, table B25064
• National Center for Education Statistics: Digest of Education Statistics 2024, table 330.10

Prices and pay through September 2026; data last refreshed October 25, 2026. Suggested citation: Dave Manuel, "The Hours-of-Work Price Museum," DaveManuel.com, data through September 2026, https://www.davemanuel.com/hours-of-work-price-museum.php. Charts and tables may be reused with a link to this page.

Related: Inflation Calculator · Where Every Dollar You Spend on Gas Actually Goes · Median Household Income · Mortgage Calculator · Renting vs Buying Calculator