Inflation Calculator

Calculate future purchasing power, or how much a past amount is worth in today's dollars, at any inflation rate.

⏱ Updated: 17 Sep 2026

Calculator

Free inflation calculator: project a future price, or find the past purchasing power of an amount, using a chosen inflation rate.

Future Amount Equivalent Past Amount
Change From Original
%

Calculate an amount's future value under inflation, or its equivalent purchasing power in the past.

How to Use the Inflation Calculator

Enter an amount and a number of years, then toggle between Future Value and Past Purchasing Power depending on which direction you're asking about. The rate field defaults to 3%, a rough stand-in for the long-run historical U.S. CPI average — not a forecast, and not necessarily relevant outside the U.S., so replace it with your own country's current or expected rate if you're working with anything else.

Future Value answers "what will this cost, or be worth, later" — it projects an amount forward using the rate compounded annually. Past Purchasing Power runs the same math backward, answering the opposite question: what amount, years ago, bought what today's figure buys, or equivalently, what today's amount would have been "worth" back then.

Future Value = Amount × (1 + rate)ⁿ
Past Purchasing Power = Amount ÷ (1 + rate)ⁿ

Run $1,000 forward ten years at 3% and it becomes $1,343.92 — a 34.39% increase, which is really a statement about prices rising, not about the dollar amount itself changing. Run the same $1,000 backward instead and it works out to $744.09, meaning $744.09 a decade ago bought what $1,000 buys today — a 25.59% difference in the other direction.

The two modes are mirror images of each other at the same rate and years, so running a Future Value result back through Past Purchasing Power mode is a decent way to sanity-check that the rate you entered is doing what you expect. Both modes report the percentage change alongside the adjusted amount, since the dollar figure alone can undersell how large the shift gets — 3% barely bends the numbers over two or three years and compounds into a very different story over twenty or thirty.