Inflation Calculator
Calculate purchasing power change using real US CPI data
Frequently Asked Questions
It uses the US Bureau of Labor Statistics' published annual average CPI-U inflation rate for each year, the same official measure used by the government's own inflation calculator, compounded year over year between your chosen start and end years.
Cumulative inflation is the product of (1 + each year's rate) compounded across every year in the range — not a simple sum of the annual rates, since inflation compounds year over year just like interest.
It's the percentage by which your original amount's real buying power has shrunk. If $1,000 from 2015 has the same buying power as $1,356 in 2025, your original $1,000 lost about 26% of its purchasing power over that decade.
2021-2022 saw the highest US inflation in four decades (4.7% and 8.0%) due to pandemic-related supply chain disruption, stimulus spending, and energy price shocks — a notable outlier in the otherwise low-and-stable 2010s.