$100 in 1947 is worth $174 in 1970,
because prices increased 74.0% over that period, an average of
2.44% a year.
$100 in 1947 has
the same buying power as
$174
in 1970
Detailed inflation statistics
Cumulative price change
74.0%
Average inflation rate
2.44% per year
Converted amount ($100 base)
$174
Price difference ($100 base)
$73.99
CPI in 1947
22.3
CPI in 1970
38.8
Inflation in 1947
14.36%
Inflation in 1970
5.72%
$100 in 1947 → 1970
$174
$100 in 1970 → 1947
$57.47
What happened to prices between 1947 and 1970
Between 1947 and 1970, the Consumer Price Index went from 22.3 to 38.8.
Cumulatively, prices increased 74.0%, which works out to an average of
2.44% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1947 bought what
$0.57 buys in 1970: the 1947 dollar
lost 42.5% of its purchasing power over
these 23 years.
Consumer prices rose 14.4% in 1947, up from 1946’s 8.3% and
the fastest annual increase since 1920, as the last of the wartime price
controls disappeared and a year of strikes, wage catch-up, and lingering
shortages hit consumers all at once. Congress answered the previous year’s
strike wave that June, overriding President Truman’s veto to pass the
Taft-Hartley Act, which banned secondary boycotts and the closed shop and
let states adopt “right-to-work” laws curbing union power. American
attention was also turning outward. In a June 5 speech at Harvard,
Secretary of State George Marshall outlined a U.S.-funded plan to rebuild
Western Europe’s economies, an effort that would become known as the
Marshall Plan once Congress funded it the following year. The government
reorganized itself for the confrontation with the Soviet Union that plan was
partly designed to prevent: the National Security Act, signed July 26,
created the Department of Defense, the Air Force as a separate service, the
Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Council. Consumer
prices stood 125.3% above their 1913 level and 30.4% above
1929’s pre-Depression peak, up from just 1.2% above it four
years earlier. First-class postage held at 3 cents, and the minimum wage
stayed at 40 cents an hour.
Every 1947 amount converts to 1970 at the same ratio, 1.74: $1,000 becomes
$1,740, and $10,000 becomes $17,399.
Amount in 1947
Value in 1970
$1.00
$1.74
$5.00
$8.70
$10.00
$17.40
$20.00
$34.80
$50.00
$87.00
$100
$174
$500
$870
$1,000
$1,740
$5,000
$8,700
$10,000
$17,399
$100,000
$173,991
$1,000,000
$1,739,910
Inflation by spending category, 1947–1970
Between 1947 and 1970, medical care rose the most, up 151.9%, while apparel rose the least, up 48.4%, against 74.0% for all items. The headline number is an average; here is what $100 of 1947
spending costs in 1970, by category:
Category
Avg. yearly inflation
$100 in 1947 →
All items (CPI-U)
2.44%
$174
Medical care
4.10%
$252
Transportation
3.12%
$203
Food
2.14%
$163
Apparel
1.73%
$148
Not shown because the BLS began these indexes after 1947: core (all items less food & energy) (1957–), energy (1957–), housing (1967–), recreation (1993–), education & communication (1993–).
Decade by decade: 1947 to 1970
Prices climbed fastest in the 1960s, averaging 2.74% a year, and slowest in the 1950s (2.08% a year). Each step below chains into the full 1947–1970 change:
Years
Avg. yearly inflation
Price change
$100 from 1947, at end
1947–1950
2.62%
8.1%
$108
1950–1960
2.08%
22.8%
$133
1960–1970
2.74%
31.1%
$174
Year by year: CPI and the value of $100 from 1947
$100 from 1947 had already become $130 by
1958, on its way to $174 in 1970; each row shows the CPI, that
year's inflation rate, and the running value.
Within the span, inflation peaked at 8.1% in 1948, and prices fell 1.2% in 1949, the deepest deflation of the period.
In 1970, prices rose 5.7% and $100 from 1947 had the buying
power of $174; the year's average CPI of 38.8 is the level
behind every 1970 figure on this page.
Consumer prices rose 5.7% in 1970, up from 1969’s 5.5%, extending a
run of faster price growth that stretched back to the mid-1960s, even as a
recession that began in December 1969 pushed unemployment toward 6%. Prices
and joblessness rising together confounded the era’s economic thinking, which
held that policymakers could trade a little more inflation for a little less
unemployment; 1970 was an early sign that trade-off was breaking down, a
pattern that would harden into stagflation later in the decade. Washington
restructured how it delivered mail that year: after postal workers staged the
first strike ever by federal employees that March, Congress passed the Postal
Reorganization Act in August, replacing the cabinet-level Post Office
Department with the independent U.S. Postal Service. Environmental policy
also took shape in 1970. An estimated 20 million Americans marked the first
Earth Day on April 22, and the Environmental Protection Agency opened that
December to enforce the Clean Air Act and the pollution rules that followed.
The Vietnam War kept dividing the country: on May 4, National Guard troops
fired on antiwar demonstrators at Kent State University in Ohio, killing four
students and setting off strikes on hundreds of campuses. A median household
earned $8,734 that year, a gallon of gas averaged 36 cents, and a first-class
stamp cost 6 cents, the rate it had held since 1968. Prices stood 291.9%
above their 1913 level by the end of 1970, a milestone that
would look almost mild against the decade still to come.
MLA: “Inflation from 1947 to 1970: $100 is worth $174 today.” InflationCalculator.com, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U data, https://inflationcalculator.com/inflation/1947-to-1970/
APA: InflationCalculator.com. Inflation from 1947 to 1970. Based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U data. Retrieved from https://inflationcalculator.com/inflation/1947-to-1970/