Historical Inflation Calculator
Six countries. 276 years. Free and ad-free.
RealWorth is a historical inflation calculator that shows what money really bought across the past two and a half centuries. Most calculators give you a single number — "$100 in 1920 is worth $1,812 today" — and leave it there. We try to put that number in human terms. The same $100 was roughly nine weeks of a factory worker's wages, paid about two months of family rent, and bought close to 200 loaves of bread. That's the part that makes the history feel real.
Translate money across time
Pick an amount, a year, and a country. See the human story behind the number.
1800–2025
up to 2026
Quick examples
Pick a country
Each country page covers the full history of its currency, including key events, annual price data, and wage context. Dataset coverage varies by country.
Most popular calculations
What an inflation calculator actually does
An inflation calculator takes two numbers — a Consumer Price Index value for an older year, and a CPI value for today — and divides one by the other. The ratio tells you how much prices have risen. Multiply your old amount by that ratio and you get the "equivalent" value today. That's the whole trick. Every site that offers this is doing the same basic division, and the differences between them come down to which CPI series they use and how they handle years before official data existed.
There's a catch. CPI is an average across a basket of goods, weighted for how households actually spent their money in some reference year. Housing, food, transport, healthcare, education — all bundled together and averaged. But the things in that basket didn't inflate at the same pace. US healthcare costs have risen about 30% faster than the general CPI since 1990. College tuition tripled in real terms over a generation. Meanwhile, electronics got cheaper. So a headline CPI figure of, say, 300% cumulative inflation is a useful summary — but it tells you almost nothing about your specific lived experience of money losing value.
This is why RealWorth goes a step further on every calculation. Alongside the CPI number, we show wages (how many weeks of the average worker's salary the sum represented), bread prices (a proxy for food affordability), and rent (the single biggest line item in most household budgets, then and now). None of these are perfect either, but together they get closer to what money actually meant in a given era. Sometimes they agree with CPI; sometimes they tell a different story.
The calculator above runs on public data sources: the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bank of England's Millennium Dataset, Destatis, INSEE, Statistics Canada, Statistics Bureau of Japan, and historical reconstructions from MeasuringWorth.com. Each country page documents the specific sources used for that country. See our Methodology and Data Sources pages for details on how each country's data was assembled.
Questions people ask
What's the difference between an inflation calculator and a purchasing power calculator?
An inflation calculator compares price levels. A historical purchasing-power comparison may also need to convert monetary units after a currency reform. RealWorth identifies those units separately for France and Germany. Wage and goods comparisons are shown only where usable same-year context exists.
Why do different inflation calculators give slightly different answers?
Calculators can use different indices, reference months, annual averages, historical reconstructions or currency units. Our verified snapshots and legacy estimates are distinguished on each result. We have not established a fixed error bound or equivalent accuracy across all countries and years; interpolation can miss substantial price movements.
How accurate is pre-1900 inflation data?
Historical reconstructions have different source coverage and uncertainty from modern CPI. Our pre-1900 UK/US legacy values have not been verified observation by observation. France results before 1901 are withheld; Germany uses published, rounded Bundesbank historical coefficients from 1873 with documented limitations. Missing data is never proof that no official or research source exists.
Does RealWorth support currencies beyond the 6 listed countries?
The interface supports USA, UK, Germany, France, Canada and Japan, but verified coverage differs. See the Methodology and Data Sources pages for imported observations, legacy estimates and unsupported periods. France/Germany use explicit historical currency models; other national datasets still need further verification.
Why does your site show loaves of bread and weeks of rent instead of just a number?
A multiplier like 'times 16' is hard to feel. Nine weeks of wages, or the ability to buy 200 loaves of bread, is something a human can picture. CPI is an index, and indices erase texture. We try to put the texture back in.
All values are estimates for historical and educational purposes only. Not financial advice. Methodology →