Value of $100 in 1923, adjusted to 2026

What happened to prices between 1923 and 2026

Between 1923 and 2026, the Consumer Price Index went from 17.1 to 332.243. Cumulatively, prices increased 1842.9%, which works out to an average of 2.92% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1923 bought what $0.05 buys in 2026: the 1923 dollar lost 94.9% of its purchasing power over these 103 years.

Consumer prices rose 1.8% in 1923, the first increase since 1920 and a sign the postwar deflation had run its course; the economy settled into the steadier growth that defined much of the rest of the decade. The year’s biggest shock was political rather than economic: Warren Harding died August 2 in San Francisco while returning from a trip to Alaska, and Vice President Calvin Coolidge was sworn in the next day at his family’s farmhouse in Plymouth Notch, Vermont, administered the oath of office by his own father, a notary public, by lamplight. Coolidge would go on to preside over the low, stable inflation of the “Roaring Twenties.” The contrast with Germany that year was stark. The Weimar Republic’s currency collapse reached its peak in November 1923, with prices doubling every few days and a loaf of bread costing billions of marks; Germany introduced a new currency, the Rentenmark, that month to halt the spiral. U.S. consumer prices, by comparison, had moved in single digits or held flat every year since 1921, a gap that shaped how American economists would later think about what made the postwar inflation of Europe so different from the mild swings at home. First-class postage stayed at 2 cents.

More about inflation in 1923 →

The destination year: 2026

In 2026, prices rose 3.2% and $100 from 1923 had the buying power of $1,943; the year's average CPI of 332.243 is the level behind every 2026 figure on this page.