$100 in 1949 is worth $163 in 1970,
because prices increased 63.0% over that period, an average of
2.35% a year.
$100 in 1949 has
the same buying power as
$163
in 1970
Detailed inflation statistics
Cumulative price change
63.0%
Average inflation rate
2.35% per year
Converted amount ($100 base)
$163
Price difference ($100 base)
$63.03
CPI in 1949
23.8
CPI in 1970
38.8
Inflation in 1949
-1.24%
Inflation in 1970
5.72%
$100 in 1949 → 1970
$163
$100 in 1970 → 1949
$61.34
What happened to prices between 1949 and 1970
Between 1949 and 1970, the Consumer Price Index went from 23.8 to 38.8.
Cumulatively, prices increased 63.0%, which works out to an average of
2.35% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1949 bought what
$0.61 buys in 1970: the 1949 dollar
lost 38.7% of its purchasing power over
these 21 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 1970 at the same ratio, 1.63: $1,000 becomes
$1,630, and $10,000 becomes $16,303.
Amount in 1949
Value in 1970
$1.00
$1.63
$5.00
$8.15
$10.00
$16.30
$20.00
$32.61
$50.00
$81.51
$100
$163
$500
$815
$1,000
$1,630
$5,000
$8,151
$10,000
$16,303
$100,000
$163,025
$1,000,000
$1,630,252
Inflation by spending category, 1949–1970
Between 1949 and 1970, medical care rose the most, up 129.7%, while apparel rose the least, up 45.1%, against 63.0% for all items. The headline number is an average; here is what $100 of 1949
spending costs in 1970, by category:
Category
Avg. yearly inflation
$100 in 1949 →
All items (CPI-U)
2.35%
$163
Medical care
4.04%
$230
Transportation
2.55%
$170
Food
2.17%
$157
Apparel
1.79%
$145
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 1970
Prices climbed fastest in the 1960s, averaging 2.74% a year, and slowest in the 1940s (1.26% a year). Each step below chains into the full 1949–1970 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
1960–1970
2.74%
31.1%
$163
Year by year: CPI and the value of $100 from 1949
$100 from 1949 had already become $122 by
1959, on its way to $163 in 1970; 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 1970, prices rose 5.7% and $100 from 1949 had the buying
power of $163; 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 1949 to 1970: $100 is worth $163 today.” InflationCalculator.com, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U data, https://inflationcalculator.com/inflation/1949-to-1970/
APA: InflationCalculator.com. Inflation from 1949 to 1970. Based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U data. Retrieved from https://inflationcalculator.com/inflation/1949-to-1970/