Inflation · Updated monthly · Figures to July 2026
What does Inflation do to your first salary?
Consumer prices are 3.5% higher than a year ago, and a 1980 dollar does the work of about $4.03 today. The calculator below translates any year's money into this month's - which is the only fair way to compare a price across decades.
Every argument about whether things "used to be cheaper" is really an argument about this dataset. Prices from different decades can't be compared straight - a 1980 dollar and a 2026 dollar are different units that happen to share a name. So start with your own year: type an amount, slide to a year, and read it in this month's money. It works in both directions of nostalgia - the $0.50 cinema ticket of legend, or what your first salary was really worth.
Purchasing power · 1947 to 2026
$100 in 1995 → $218 today
The exchange rate between decades
Here's the line doing the translating: the year-on-year change in the consumer price index - how much more the same basket of goods costs than it did twelve months earlier, plotted monthly since 1947. The rate comes straight from the published index (the arithmetic is one division), so the line and the calculator can't disagree with each other. The mountains are the famous ones: the 1970s oil-shock years dominate everything, and you can see exactly how 2022 measured up against them - drag the slider and look. Below zero is deflation, and the chart shows how rare that is.
One caveat on all of it: this is the average basket. Your personal inflation depends on what you buy, and if that's mostly housing and education, it has run hotter than this line.
What this chart can't tell you
The CPI measures a national urban basket; your town and your basket both differ. The index is revised only rarely, but the seasonal adjustment can shift recent months a little. And year-on-year is a rear-view figure: it tells you what the last twelve months did, not what the next twelve will.
Further reading
All of our numbers come from live, free sources - here, the US consumer price index via FRED, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis's data service. The inflation rate and the calculator are both worked out from the same published index, and the page updates when a new month is published.
If you want to dig deeper, FRED's page for the index carries the full history and every related series free. And take the chart if it's useful - the copy button includes the source and a link back.