Value of $100 in 1949, adjusted to 2026

What happened to prices between 1949 and 2026

Between 1949 and 2026, the Consumer Price Index went from 23.8 to 332.243. Cumulatively, prices increased 1296.0%, which works out to an average of 3.48% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1949 bought what $0.07 buys in 2026: the 1949 dollar lost 92.8% of its purchasing power over these 77 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.

More about inflation in 1949 →

The destination year: 2026

In 2026, prices rose 3.2% and $100 from 1949 had the buying power of $1,396; the year's average CPI of 332.243 is the level behind every 2026 figure on this page.