See what an amount of money from one year is worth in another, based on an average annual inflation rate you choose.
Enter an amount, a start year, an end year, and an average inflation rate, and this tool projects what that amount would be worth at the later date if prices rose by that rate every year in between. If the end year is later than the start year, it shows how much more money you'd need to buy the same things. If the end year is earlier, it shows what that future amount would have been worth back then.
Real inflation doesn't move in a straight line — some years run hot, others are flat or even negative. This calculator uses a single average rate applied every year, which is a simplification. For a rough, order-of-magnitude sense of how prices have shifted it works well; for precise historical figures you'd want to look up actual year-by-year CPI data rather than an averaged estimate.
If you've ever heard someone say "a dollar doesn't go as far as it used to," this is the math behind that feeling. At 3% average inflation, prices roughly double every 24 years. At 6%, that doubling time is cut in half. Small differences in the rate compound into surprisingly large gaps over a couple of decades — which is part of why long-term savings need to earn more than the inflation rate just to stand still in real terms.