Inflation calculator

We divide the price index for the year you want by the price index for the year you started from, then multiply your amount by the result. The index is the Consumer Price Index published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and we use their published figures exactly as released. Nothing is estimated, smoothed, or filled in.

Usually one of three reasons. Some calculators compare month to month while others compare full years. Some use the newest complete calendar year as "today" when a more recent month is already published, which understates the answer by up to a year of inflation. And some recompute the yearly averages themselves rather than using the ones the government published, which disagrees with the official figures in most years before 1990. We use published annual averages for past years and the newest published month for today, and we label which is which.

Because the single average number is misleading for almost everybody. Since 1978, hospital care has risen about twenty times over while clothing has risen about one and a half times. Both are inside the same average. If your question is really about rent, or tuition, or groceries, the average is the wrong answer and the category is the right one. No other calculator on the first page of results shows you this.

The overall number goes back to 1913, which is as far as the official index exists. Individual categories start at different times, because the government did not measure them all from the beginning. Rent and clothing go back to 1913, medical care and transportation to 1935, housing to 1967, and recreation and education only to 1993. The calculator shows whichever categories genuinely cover the years you picked and tells you plainly which ones did not exist yet.

The government published no new vehicle price index for 1942 through 1946, because civilian car production had essentially stopped during the war, and none for used cars in 1968. We refuse those years rather than estimating across the gap. The years on either side exist, so a calculator that quietly averaged them would give you a number that looks perfectly reasonable and was never published by anyone.

It can do the arithmetic, but be clear about what that is. Past figures are measurements. A future figure is whatever rate you assume, compounded. Nobody knows future inflation, so the forward section makes you choose the rate and shows it beside the answer. If a calculator gives you a future number without showing you the assumption behind it, it is making one up on your behalf.

Yes. Every figure here is the U.S. Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, which covers over 90 percent of the U.S. population. It is not valid for the UK, Canada, India, or anywhere else, because prices in those countries moved differently and each publishes its own index.

No, and that is deliberate. The government publishes regional indexes, but they cover four broad regions rather than cities, most categories only start in 1998, and the agency specifically advises against using local indexes to compare one place with another. Rather than ship a regional breakdown that cannot bear the weight people would put on it, we use the national figures, which is what the agency itself recommends.

Because the medical care index measures what households pay out of their own pockets. It excludes employer-paid insurance premiums, Medicare Part A, and Medicaid. That is most of what health care actually costs in the country, so the index covers far less of the picture than its name suggests. The hospital services row is closer to what people mean when they say medical costs have exploded.

The page shows the date of the newest figure it holds, and that date is refreshed whenever the underlying data is pulled. The government publishes a new monthly figure around the middle of each month, and the annual average for a completed year arrives the following January. If you ever see a date here that looks stale, it is stale, and the number is out of date by exactly that much.

Not entirely, and the agency says so itself. It improves its methods over time and does not apply those improvements backwards, so a comparison spanning many decades mixes methodologies. The agency publishes an alternative series using consistent methods, but only back to 1978 and only for the overall number, so it cannot power a category breakdown. We use the official published series and tell you this, which most calculators do not.