Historical Inflation Calculator
Six countries. 276 years.
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?
Technically they calculate the same thing — how money's value has changed over time. But the framing matters. An inflation calculator gives you a number: '$100 in 1920 is worth $1,812 today.' A purchasing power calculator tries to show what that number meant: nine weeks of wages, 200 loaves of bread, several months of rent. RealWorth does both on every page.
Why do different inflation calculators give slightly different answers?
They use different CPI series and different reconstructions for years before official data existed. The US BLS calculator uses CPI-U back to 1913. MeasuringWorth uses Warren & Pearson's wholesale price index for earlier years. We follow the same mainstream sources, and our results typically fall within a few percent of BLS and MeasuringWorth.
How accurate is pre-1900 inflation data?
Reasonably accurate for the UK (Bank of England has reconstructed data back to 1750) and the USA (MeasuringWorth has solid data back to 1800). Accuracy drops sharply before 1800 because there were no national price surveys. Pre-industrial data should be treated as an informed estimate, not a precise measurement.
Does RealWorth support currencies beyond the 6 listed countries?
Not yet. USA, UK, Germany, France, Canada, and Japan are the six economies with reliable long-run CPI data that we've built proper integrations for. Spain, Italy, Australia, and India are on the roadmap, but only once we have high-quality price and wage data for them.
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 →