$100 in 1943 is worth $138 in 1949,
because prices increased 37.6% over that period, an average of
5.46% a year.
$100 in 1943 has
the same buying power as
$138
in 1949
Detailed inflation statistics
Cumulative price change
37.6%
Average inflation rate
5.46% per year
Converted amount ($100 base)
$138
Price difference ($100 base)
$37.57
CPI in 1943
17.3
CPI in 1949
23.8
Inflation in 1943
6.13%
Inflation in 1949
-1.24%
$100 in 1943 → 1949
$138
$100 in 1949 → 1943
$72.69
What happened to prices between 1943 and 1949
Between 1943 and 1949, the Consumer Price Index went from 17.3 to 23.8.
Cumulatively, prices increased 37.6%, which works out to an average of
5.46% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1943 bought what
$0.73 buys in 1949: the 1943 dollar
lost 27.3% of its purchasing power over
these 6 years.
Consumer prices rose 6.1% in 1943, a slower pace than 1942’s
surge but still well above anything the country had seen before the war.
The slowdown owed largely to the “Hold the Line” order, issued that April,
which froze most wages, prices, and rents at their current levels after the
previous year’s jump showed how far demand had outrun the existing
controls. Rationing grew more sophisticated alongside the freeze: starting
in February, a points system split scarce goods into red points for meat,
butter, and other fats and blue points for canned and processed foods,
letting households budget across categories instead of simply going without
once a flat quota ran dry. The government also changed how it collected the
taxes paying for all of it. The Current Tax Payment Act, signed June 9,
required employers to withhold federal income tax directly from paychecks
for the first time, smoothing the flow of wartime revenue and creating the
pay-as-you-go system still used today. Consumer prices stood 74.7% above
their 1913 level and 33.1% above 1933’s
Depression-era low. First-class postage held at 3 cents, and the minimum
wage stayed at 30 cents an hour.
Every 1943 amount converts to 1949 at the same ratio, 1.38: $1,000 becomes
$1,376, and $10,000 becomes $13,757.
Amount in 1943
Value in 1949
$1.00
$1.38
$5.00
$6.88
$10.00
$13.76
$20.00
$27.51
$50.00
$68.79
$100
$138
$500
$688
$1,000
$1,376
$5,000
$6,879
$10,000
$13,757
$100,000
$137,572
$1,000,000
$1,375,723
Inflation by spending category, 1943–1949
Between 1943 and 1949, apparel rose the most, up 46.8%, while medical care rose the least, up 32.1%, against 37.6% for all items. The headline number is an average; here is what $100 of 1943
spending costs in 1949, by category:
Category
Avg. yearly inflation
$100 in 1943 →
All items (CPI-U)
5.46%
$138
Apparel
6.60%
$147
Food
6.53%
$146
Transportation
5.64%
$139
Medical care
4.75%
$132
Not shown because the BLS began these indexes after 1943: core (all items less food & energy) (1957–), energy (1957–), housing (1967–), recreation (1993–), education & communication (1993–).
Year by year: CPI and the value of $100 from 1943
$100 from 1943 had already become $113 by
1946, on its way to $138 in 1949; each row shows the CPI, that
year's inflation rate, and the running value.
Within the span, inflation peaked at 14.4% in 1947, and prices fell 1.2% in 1949, the deepest deflation of the period.
In 1949, prices fell 1.2% and $100 from 1943 had the buying
power of $138; the year's average CPI of 23.8 is the level
behind every 1949 figure on this page.
Consumer prices fell 1.2% in 1949, down from 1948’s 8.1%
gain and the first annual decline since 1939, the first real break in a
decade otherwise defined by wartime and postwar inflation. A mild recession
drove the drop: the National Bureau of Economic Research dates a downturn
from November 1948 to October 1949, as businesses worked off inventories
built up during the postwar buying boom and price pressure finally eased.
The Cold War hardened around the same time. On April 4, the United States,
Canada, and ten Western European nations signed the North Atlantic Treaty,
committing to treat an attack on one member as an attack on all and
formalizing the Western alliance against Soviet expansion. That August 29,
the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb, ending the American nuclear
monopoly just four years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki and setting off an
arms race that would run for decades. Congress closed out the decade’s wage
policy that October, passing the Fair Labor Standards Amendments of 1949 to
raise the federal minimum wage to 75 cents an hour effective the following
January, nearly double the 40 cents that had held since 1945. The decade
closed with consumer prices 140.4% above their 1913 level,
up 70% since 1940 alone even after 1949’s decline.
First-class postage held at 3 cents.
MLA: “Inflation from 1943 to 1949: $100 is worth $138 today.” InflationCalculator.com, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U data, https://inflationcalculator.com/inflation/1943-to-1949/
APA: InflationCalculator.com. Inflation from 1943 to 1949. Based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U data. Retrieved from https://inflationcalculator.com/inflation/1943-to-1949/