Inflation Calculator

Inflation is the quiet tax on cash: the same dollar buys less every year. This calculator converts money across time using the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) — the exact series the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes and the IRS uses to index tax brackets. Pick any two years between 1913 and 2025 and any amount, and you get the equivalent value, the cumulative price change, and the average annual rate across the gap.

The math is a straight CPI ratio: value in end-year dollars = amount x (CPI end year / CPI start year). One hundred 2000-dollars becomes $186.99 in 2025-dollars, because the CPI-U rose from 172.2 to 322.0 — an 86.99% cumulative climb averaging 2.54% per year. The average hides the drama, though: prices roughly tripled in the 1970s while they actually fell during the Great Depression — 1920 dollars bought 32% more by 1935.

The second mode projects forward instead of backward. Plug in an assumed annual rate — the Federal Reserve targets 2%, and the long-run US average since 1913 is near 3.2% — and see the cost of today’s basket down the road, plus the purchasing power your cash loses. At a steady 3%, $10,000 of today’s spending costs $13,439.16 in ten years, and a dollar held in cash is worth only 74.4 cents of today’s money by then.

Why does this matter for your paycheck? A raise that merely matches inflation keeps your real income flat — that is what "cost of living adjustment" means. Between 2010 and 2025 prices rose 47.67% (averaging 2.63% a year), so a salary that stagnated over that stretch quietly lost nearly a third of its purchasing power. Run your salary through our paycheck calculator and this page together to see nominal versus real pay.

Two caveats worth knowing. CPI-U measures urban consumer prices nationwide — your city’s rent surge may outrun it badly (see our relocation calculator for cost-of-living moves). And official CPI is an average across a fixed basket: if your personal basket skews toward housing, healthcare or tuition, your felt inflation ran hotter. The index is still the standard yardstick — it drives tax-bracket indexing and Social Security COLAs, which is why we also track the numbers on our federal tax brackets page.