$100 in 1949 is worth $140 in 1967,
because prices increased 40.3% over that period, an average of
1.90% a year.
$100 in 1949 has
the same buying power as
$140
in 1967
Detailed inflation statistics
Cumulative price change
40.3%
Average inflation rate
1.90% per year
Converted amount ($100 base)
$140
Price difference ($100 base)
$40.34
CPI in 1949
23.8
CPI in 1967
33.4
Inflation in 1949
-1.24%
Inflation in 1967
3.09%
$100 in 1949 → 1967
$140
$100 in 1967 → 1949
$71.26
What happened to prices between 1949 and 1967
Between 1949 and 1967, the Consumer Price Index went from 23.8 to 33.4.
Cumulatively, prices increased 40.3%, which works out to an average of
1.90% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1949 bought what
$0.71 buys in 1967: the 1949 dollar
lost 28.7% of its purchasing power over
these 18 years.
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.
Every 1949 amount converts to 1967 at the same ratio, 1.40: $1,000 becomes
$1,403, and $10,000 becomes $14,034.
Amount in 1949
Value in 1967
$1.00
$1.40
$5.00
$7.02
$10.00
$14.03
$20.00
$28.07
$50.00
$70.17
$100
$140
$500
$702
$1,000
$1,403
$5,000
$7,017
$10,000
$14,034
$100,000
$140,336
$1,000,000
$1,403,361
Inflation by spending category, 1949–1967
Between 1949 and 1967, medical care rose the most, up 90.5%, while apparel rose the least, up 25.0%, against 40.3% for all items. The headline number is an average; here is what $100 of 1949
spending costs in 1967, by category:
Category
Avg. yearly inflation
$100 in 1949 →
All items (CPI-U)
1.90%
$140
Medical care
3.65%
$191
Transportation
2.30%
$151
Food
1.74%
$136
Apparel
1.25%
$125
Not shown because the BLS began these indexes after 1949: core (all items less food & energy) (1957–), energy (1957–), housing (1967–), recreation (1993–), education & communication (1993–).
Decade by decade: 1949 to 1967
Prices climbed fastest in the 1950s, averaging 2.08% a year, and slowest in the 1940s (1.26% a year). Each step below chains into the full 1949–1967 change:
Years
Avg. yearly inflation
Price change
$100 from 1949, at end
1949–1950
1.26%
1.3%
$101
1950–1960
2.08%
22.8%
$124
1960–1967
1.74%
12.8%
$140
Year by year: CPI and the value of $100 from 1949
$100 from 1949 had already become $121 by
1958, on its way to $140 in 1967; each row shows the CPI, that
year's inflation rate, and the running value.
Within the span, inflation peaked at 7.9% in 1951, and prices fell 0.4% in 1955, the deepest deflation of the period.
In 1967, prices rose 3.1% and $100 from 1949 had the buying
power of $140; the year's average CPI of 33.4 is the level
behind every 1967 figure on this page.
Consumer prices rose 3.1% in 1967, up from 1966’s 2.9% as
Vietnam War spending kept climbing alongside expanding Great Society
programs, a combination of rising military and domestic outlays that
economists later blamed for entrenching inflation through the rest of the
decade. The minimum wage rose that February 1, to $1.40 an hour, the
first step of a phased increase Congress had set the year before. Urban
unrest reached a peak that July, when days of rioting left 26 dead in
Newark and 43 dead in Detroit, the deadliest of that summer’s roughly 160
disturbances; Johnson responded by forming the Kerner Commission to study
the causes of the unrest. The Supreme Court gained its first Black
justice that year too: the Senate confirmed Thurgood Marshall on August
30, and he was sworn in that October after serving as U.S. Solicitor
General and, before that, as the lead attorney in Brown v. Board of
Education. Consumer prices finished 1967 237.4% above their
1913 level. First-class postage held at 5 cents.
MLA: “Inflation from 1949 to 1967: $100 is worth $140 today.” InflationCalculator.com, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U data, https://inflationcalculator.com/inflation/1949-to-1967/
APA: InflationCalculator.com. Inflation from 1949 to 1967. Based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U data. Retrieved from https://inflationcalculator.com/inflation/1949-to-1967/