This free inflation calculator uses real Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI data going back to 1913. Find out what a dollar from any past year is worth today, or project how much purchasing power your money will lose in the years ahead.
Choose a direction. Past to today converts an old amount into today's money using actual CPI index values. Today to future projects how much purchasing power an amount loses at an inflation rate you choose. Fill in the fields, then press Calculate.
Data runs from 1913. The 2026 figure is an estimate based on the most recent quarterly data.
Enter an amount and pick your years, then press Calculate. Your converted value, the total inflation between those years, and a purchasing power chart will appear here.
Inflation is simply the rate at which prices rise, which means the same dollar buys a little less each year. To measure it, the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks the price of a fixed basket of goods and services and publishes the result as the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, usually shortened to CPI-U. The index is set so that the 1982 to 1984 period equals 100.
Once you have index values, converting money between two years is straightforward. This calculator holds the annual average CPI for every year from 1913 onward and applies one formula:
Amount x (CPI target / CPI start)
That is the same arithmetic the Federal Reserve and the BLS use, which is why a proper CPI-based result differs from the rough "3 percent a year" estimate most simple tools give you. Real inflation was never a smooth 3 percent. It was 17.4 percent in 1917, negative 10.5 percent in 1932, 13.5 percent in 1980, and 8.0 percent in 2022.
The forward mode works differently on purpose. Nobody knows future CPI, so that side of the calculator compounds a rate you choose and shows both what a future purchase will cost and what today's money will feel like once prices have moved.
The calculator returns more than one number, and each answers a different question.
In past-to-today mode, this is your original amount restated in the target year's money. It answers "what would I need now to buy what that bought then." In future mode, it is what a purchase costing your amount today would cost after inflation.
Total inflation is the full percentage change in prices across the whole span. The annual average is the compound yearly rate that would produce the same result, which is almost always lower than people expect. A 900 percent total increase over 75 years works out to only about 3.1 percent a year, because compounding does the heavy lifting.
In forward mode this shows the dollar amount of buying power that evaporates over your chosen period. It is the number worth showing to anyone who keeps large balances in a near-zero interest account, because it makes an invisible loss visible.
The line traces the value of your money year by year. In past mode it climbs, showing how many of today's dollars it takes to match the original sum. In future mode it falls, showing today's money shrinking in real terms.
You do not need software for this. The standard method uses two CPI values.
((CPI_new - CPI_old) / CPI_old) x 100
A worked example: the CPI annual average was 240.0 in 2016 and 321.9 in 2025. Subtracting gives 81.9, dividing by 240.0 gives 0.341, and multiplying by 100 gives about 34.1 percent total inflation across those nine years.
To find the average annual rate rather than the total, take the ratio of the two index values, raise it to the power of one divided by the number of years, and subtract one. For the example above that is 34.1 percent total, but roughly 3.3 percent a year.
Spreadsheets make this quick. Put the older CPI value in cell A1 and the newer one in B1, then:
The same three formulas work in Google Sheets without modification. If you want to see how those rates compound over time on the savings side instead, our compound interest calculator runs the reverse of this arithmetic.
One of the most common questions people bring to an inflation calculator is what a single dollar from a given year is worth now. This table answers it directly, using CPI annual averages against the 2026 estimate of 334.4.
| Year | CPI that year | $1 then is worth now | $100 then is worth now |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1913 | 9.9 | $33.78 | $3,378 |
| 1920 | 20.0 | $16.72 | $1,672 |
| 1930 | 16.7 | $20.02 | $2,002 |
| 1940 | 14.0 | $23.89 | $2,389 |
| 1950 | 24.1 | $13.88 | $1,388 |
| 1960 | 29.6 | $11.30 | $1,130 |
| 1970 | 38.8 | $8.62 | $862 |
| 1980 | 82.4 | $4.06 | $406 |
| 1990 | 130.7 | $2.56 | $256 |
| 2000 | 172.2 | $1.94 | $194 |
| 2010 | 218.1 | $1.53 | $153 |
| 2020 | 258.8 | $1.29 | $129 |
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U annual averages. The 2026 figure is an estimate based on the most recent quarterly data.
Two things stand out. The dollar of 1940 was worth far more than the dollar of 1930, because the Depression years brought falling prices rather than rising ones. And the drop between 1970 and 1980 is the steepest decade on the table, when a dollar lost more than half its value in ten years.
The long-run average since 1913 sits near 3 percent a year, but that average hides enormous variation. Here is how each decade actually behaved.
| Decade | Average annual inflation | What drove it |
|---|---|---|
| 1913 to 1919 | 9.7% | First World War shortages |
| 1920s | -0.1% | Postwar deflation, then stable prices |
| 1930s | -2.1% | Depression era falling prices |
| 1940s | 5.5% | War spending and postwar decontrol |
| 1950s | 2.1% | Steady postwar growth |
| 1960s | 2.3% | Calm early years, rising late |
| 1970s | 7.1% | Oil shocks and wage-price spiral |
| 1980s | 5.5% | Volcker rate rises break inflation |
| 1990s | 3.0% | The long moderation |
| 2000s | 2.6% | Ends in the financial crisis |
| 2010s | 1.8% | Persistently below the Fed's target |
| 2020 to 2026 | 3.9% | Pandemic supply shocks, then cooling |
Calculated from BLS CPI-U annual averages. Decade figures are compound annual rates computed by SavingsClub across each full ten-year span.
The single worst year on record was 1917 at 17.4 percent. The sharpest fall was 1932 at negative 10.5 percent, in the depths of the Depression. The modern peak was 1980 at 13.5 percent, which is why anyone who bought a house that year remembers the mortgage rate. Most recently, 2022 hit 8.0 percent, the highest in four decades, before easing back toward the Fed's target.
The lesson from the table is not that inflation averages 3 percent. It is that inflation arrives in bursts, and the bursts are what damage a financial plan built on a flat assumption.
Inflation does more damage to retirement plans than to any other part of personal finance, because retirement is the longest horizon most people plan for and the one where income is least flexible.
The arithmetic is unforgiving. If you need $50,000 a year to live on today and prices rise at 3 percent, you need roughly $67,000 in year ten and about $90,000 by year twenty to fund the identical lifestyle. A thirty year retirement can require your income to more than double along the way.
Any projection that holds withdrawals flat in nominal dollars will overstate how long your money lasts, sometimes by many years. When you model retirement, raise your annual withdrawal by your assumed inflation rate each year. Our retirement calculator and 401(k) calculator are built to account for this.
Social Security benefits do receive an annual cost-of-living adjustment tied to a version of the CPI, which helps considerably. The catch is that the adjustment is backward looking, arriving after prices have already risen, and the basket it tracks does not weight medical costs the way most retirees experience them. Treat it as partial protection rather than full protection.
You cannot stop inflation, but you can hold assets that tend to outrun it.
The mistake to avoid is the quiet one: leaving a large balance in a checking account paying almost nothing. At 3 percent inflation, $50,000 sitting idle loses about $1,500 of purchasing power a year, every year, without a single transaction appearing on the statement.
Every inflation calculator, including this one, inherits the limitations of the index behind it. Being honest about them makes the results more useful, not less.
Your basket is not the average basket. The CPI weights a nationwide urban household's spending. If you rent in an expensive city, your personal inflation rate over the last few years was almost certainly higher than the headline. If you own with a fixed mortgage, it was probably lower.
Quality changes are adjusted for. The BLS adjusts prices when products improve, so a car that costs more but is safer and lasts longer may not register as full inflation. Reasonable people disagree about whether these adjustments are too generous.
Very long comparisons stretch the concept. Converting an 1913 amount into 2026 dollars is arithmetically valid, but the basket of goods has changed so completely that the comparison is directional rather than precise. Nobody in 1913 was buying broadband.
Assets are not in the index. House prices and stock prices are not CPI components, so periods of rapid asset inflation can feel far more expensive than the official rate suggests.
Take the Consumer Price Index for the later period, subtract the CPI for the earlier period, divide by the earlier CPI, and multiply by 100. Written out: inflation rate equals (CPI now minus CPI then) divided by CPI then, times 100. Using annual averages, prices went from 240.0 in 2016 to 321.9 in 2025, so the cumulative increase was about 34 percent over those nine years.
About $13.88. The CPI annual average was 24.1 in 1950 against roughly 334.4 in 2026, so a single 1950 dollar buys what nearly fourteen dollars buys now. Put the other way, you would have needed only about 7 cents in 1950 to match one dollar of purchasing power today.
A 1940 dollar is worth roughly $23.89 in 2026 money, since the CPI annual average was 14.0 in 1940. That is one of the largest gaps on the whole table, because the dollar lost ground steeply through the 1940s war years and again through the 1970s.
The Federal Reserve aims for 2 percent a year, which is low enough to stay in the background but high enough to keep the economy clear of deflation. The long-run US average since 1913 has run closer to 3 percent. Anything sustained well above that starts eroding savings faster than most safe accounts can keep up with.
Hold assets that have historically grown faster than prices: broad stock index funds, real estate, Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities, and Series I savings bonds, whose rate is tied directly to the CPI. For cash you actually need on hand, a high-yield savings account paying above the current inflation rate at least stops the erosion. Money sitting in a near-zero checking account loses value every single year.
Put the older CPI in cell A1 and the newer CPI in B1, then use =(B1-A1)/A1 formatted as a percentage for the total change. To convert an amount, put the dollar figure in C1 and use =C1*(B1/A1). For an average annual rate across several years, use =(B1/A1)^(1/n)-1, where n is the number of years between them.
An inflation premium is the extra yield investors demand to compensate for expected price rises. The rough version is the nominal interest rate minus the real interest rate. A common market estimate is the breakeven rate: subtract the yield on an inflation-protected Treasury from the yield on a regular Treasury of the same maturity, and the gap is roughly what the market expects inflation to average over that period.
Shorter than a flat withdrawal plan suggests, because the amount you need rises every year. If you spend $50,000 a year today and inflation averages 3 percent, you need about $67,000 a year in year ten and roughly $90,000 by year twenty just to live the same way. Any retirement projection that holds spending constant in nominal dollars will overstate how long the money lasts.
Annual averages smooth out seasonal swings and are the standard basis for comparing one year to another, which is what nearly everyone wants when they ask what an old amount is worth now. Monthly figures are better for tracking short-term movements, but they make year-to-year comparisons noisier without making them more accurate.
No, and this is the most important limitation to understand. The CPI tracks a fixed basket of goods for the average urban household. Your own inflation rate depends on where you live and what you actually buy, so a renter in an expensive city facing steep rent increases can experience inflation well above the headline number while someone with a fixed mortgage experiences less.
This calculator is for educational purposes only and is not personal financial advice. Figures are based on Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U annual averages; the 2026 value is an estimate and will be revised. CPI reflects an average urban household and may not match your personal cost of living. SavingsClub is not a licensed financial advisor. Read full disclaimer.