Financial · Live
Inflation,
a century of receipts.
Convert any U.S. dollar amount between any two years from 1913 to today. Powered by the BLS Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U). See total inflation, the average annual rate, and the year-by-year price trajectory.
Inputs
Compare two years
Range · 1913–2026 · 2025–2026 are projected
- Equivalent
- $2,524.87
- Total inflation
- +152.5%
- Years
- 36
Equivalent in 2026
$1,000.00 in 1990
What it takes in 2026 to buy what $1,000.00 bought in 1990.
Price multiplier
×2.52
Trajectory
Value of $1,000.00 (1990) over time
Milestones
Decade-by-decade
| Year | CPI | Equivalent value |
|---|---|---|
1990 | 130.7 | $1,000.00 |
2000 | 172.2 | $1,317.52 |
2010 | 218.1 | $1,668.37 |
2020 | 258.8 | $1,980.19 |
2026est. | 330 | $2,524.87 |
CPI for 2025 (≈322.0) and 2026 (≈330.0) are projected figures pending final BLS publication. Real-world results may differ as monthly CPI prints arrive.
Field guide
What is CPI, and how is inflation actually calculated?
Inflation is the rate at which the general level of prices for goods and services rises. A loaf of bread that cost 18 cents in 1950 isn't expensive today because bread itself got fancier. It's expensive because every dollar buys less than it used to. The official yardstick for measuring that erosion of purchasing power in the United States is the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, or CPI-U, published monthly by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). This calculator runs on CPI-U annual averages going back to 1913, the year the index series begins.
What is CPI?
CPI is a single number that summarizes the average price of a representative basket of goods and services bought by urban U.S. households. The basket is detailed and heavily weighted: food and beverages, housing, apparel, transportation, medical care, recreation, education, communication, and other items. Each item has a weight roughly proportional to how much American households spend on it.
Each month, BLS economists collect tens of thousands of actual prices from 75 urban areas. Those prices are aggregated into the index. The number itself is anchored to a reference period (currently 1982–1984 = 100), so a CPI of 313.7 in 2024 means the basket costs about 3.14× what it cost on average in 1982–84.
CPI-U covers about 93% of the U.S. population. There's also CPI-W (urban wage earners and clerical workers, about 29% of the population, used for Social Security cost-of-living adjustments) and C-CPI-U (a chained version that accounts for consumer substitution behaviour). For general historical comparisons, CPI-U is the standard, and it's what this calculator uses.
How is inflation calculated?
Once you have CPI values for two years, the math is straightforward division. To express a past dollar amount in today's purchasing power:
That ratio, CPI[to] ÷ CPI[from], is the price multiplier. A multiplier of 2.50 means prices have risen 150% (since the multiplier is 1 + inflation); 1.05 means a 5% total increase; 0.90 (rare) means deflation.
Total inflation over the span:
Average annual inflation (the geometric mean, the constant rate that compounds to the same multiplier over the span):
Why the geometric mean rather than the arithmetic average? Because inflation compounds. A simple average of yearly rates would over-state the true annualized growth; the geometric mean is the rate that, applied year after year, would actually produce the observed price multiplier.
Worked example: $100 in 1990 vs. today
CPI for 1990 (annual avg) was 130.7. For 2024 it was 313.689. So $100 from 1990 is worth:
Total inflation: ( 313.689 ÷ 130.7 ) − 1 ≈ +140.07%
Avg annual rate: ( 240.07/100 ) ^ (1/34) − 1 ≈ +2.62%
So a steady, decade-after-decade ~2.6% per year compounds to a price level that's 2.4× higher after 34 years. That's the quiet power of compounding, applied to erosion rather than growth.
What inflation means for your money
- Cash loses value. Money sitting in a non-interest-bearing account buys less every year by roughly the inflation rate.
- Savings need to outrun it. A 4% high-yield savings rate only gives a real return of
~1.5%when inflation is 2.5%. - Wages should rise with it. A 3% cost-of-living adjustment in a 4% inflation year is a real pay cut.
- Long-horizon goals need real-dollar planning. A retirement nest egg you imagine in today's dollars needs to be a much bigger nominal number 30 years from now.
The Rule of 72 and inflation
The classic Rule of 72: divide 72 by an annual rate to estimate how many years it takes a quantity to double. At 3% inflation, prices double in roughly 72 ÷ 3 = 24 years. At 7% (the kind of bursts seen in 1980 or 2022), it's only about 10 years. Quick mental math, surprisingly accurate.
Caveats and limitations
- CPI is an average. Your personal inflation rate depends on what you actually buy. If your spending skews toward housing, healthcare, or college tuition (all of which have outpaced overall CPI for decades), your real inflation has been higher than the headline number.
- Method changes matter. BLS has updated its methodology several times: owners' equivalent rent in 1983, hedonic adjustments in the 1990s, the switch to a chained index for some series. Long-horizon comparisons stitch across slightly different statistical recipes.
- 2025–2026 are projections. CPI is published with a one-month lag, and full-year averages aren't finalized until the year ends. Values for the current year and the immediate prior year carry an “est.” tag in the table above.
- Country-specific. This calculator uses U.S. CPI-U. Inflation differs significantly across countries; UK RPI/CPIH, EU HICP, Japan's CGPI, and various emerging-market indices have their own histories and methodologies.
Disclaimer
This calculator is an educational tool. For tax, financial-aid, salary-negotiation, or legal purposes that require precise historical inflation figures, consult the official BLS data series at bls.gov/cpi.