About RealWorth

RealWorth answers one question: what did money actually mean? Not just a multiplier, but the texture behind it — that the same sum was so many weeks of a factory worker's wages, so many months of rent, so many loaves of bread. Numbers you can picture.

Who builds this

RealWorth is designed, coded, and maintained by Andrii. The pipelines that pull price data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bank of England, the templates behind several thousand calculator pages, the charts, the live trackers, even the footer you scrolled past.

The project started with a small irritation. Every inflation calculator answers the question "what is old money worth today?" with a single number and stops there, as if a multiplier were the whole story. It never is. The interesting part is always underneath: whether that sum was a week of wages or a year of them, whether it paid the rent or barely bought dinner, whether the person holding it felt rich. Digging through the Bank of England's Millennium Dataset and a century of BLS tables to recover that texture turned out to be far more absorbing than the calculator itself — and RealWorth grew out of that digging.

Because it's one person, mistakes are possible. It also means there is no support queue: when you email about an error, the person who reads the message is the same person who can push the fix.

Where the numbers come from

All calculations use official Consumer Price Index series: the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bank of England Millennium Dataset, Destatis, INSEE, Statistics Canada, and the Statistics Bureau of Japan, with pre-1913 values reconstructed from academic sources including MeasuringWorth. Nothing is invented; where reconstructions carry wider uncertainty, the page says so. Full details live on the Methodology and Data Sources pages.

Why it exists

Most inflation calculators stop at a multiplier. But a multiplier is hard to feel, and CPI is an index — indices erase texture. RealWorth tries to put the texture back: wages, bread, rent, and the question of whether you would have been struggling or comfortable in another era. The site is free, has no paywall, and is supported by the hope that people who find it useful will link to it and share it.