Inflation Calculator
See what a dollar amount from any year between 1913 and 2025 is worth in another year using official US CPI data, or project a future value at a custom inflation rate.
Result
A hundred dollars in 1990 and a hundred dollars today are very different amounts of money. This inflation calculator translates between them: pick a start year and an end year between 1913 and 2025, enter the amount, and it returns the equivalent value, the total percentage change and the average annual inflation rate over the period.
The historical mode is built on the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U, all items, annual averages) published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — the same index used for official cost-of-living statistics. The full 1913–2025 series is bundled into the page itself, with 2025 as the most recent complete year, so the calculator works offline and never calls an external API: your amounts stay in your browser.
The projection mode answers the forward-looking question: what will an amount be worth in N years if inflation averages, say, 3%? It compounds the amount at your custom rate for up to 100 years and also shows the flip side — how much of today's purchasing power that same amount will retain. Since nobody knows future inflation, try a few rates to see an optimistic and a pessimistic range.
Note that CPI measures an average urban basket of goods and services: your personal inflation depends on what you actually buy, and years are compared by their annual average index rather than a specific month. For quick checks, remember the rule of 72 — at 3% annual inflation, prices double roughly every 24 years, which the calculator will confirm.