$100 in 1960 is worth $131 in 1970,
because prices increased 31.1% over that period, an average of
2.74% a year.
$100 in 1960 has
the same buying power as
$131
in 1970
Detailed inflation statistics
Cumulative price change
31.1%
Average inflation rate
2.74% per year
Converted amount ($100 base)
$131
Price difference ($100 base)
$31.08
CPI in 1960
29.6
CPI in 1970
38.8
Inflation in 1960
1.72%
Inflation in 1970
5.72%
$100 in 1960 → 1970
$131
$100 in 1970 → 1960
$76.29
What happened to prices between 1960 and 1970
Between 1960 and 1970, the Consumer Price Index went from 29.6 to 38.8.
Cumulatively, prices increased 31.1%, which works out to an average of
2.74% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1960 bought what
$0.76 buys in 1970: the 1960 dollar
lost 23.7% of its purchasing power over
these 10 years.
Consumer prices rose 1.7% in 1960, up from 1959’s 0.7% even
as the economy slipped into recession that April, a downturn that would
prove the shortest since World War II. The year’s defining political
moment came that November, when John F. Kennedy narrowly defeated Richard
Nixon in one of the closest presidential elections in U.S. history,
decided by roughly two-tenths of a percentage point in the popular vote.
Television played a new role in the race: the first-ever televised
presidential debate that September, watched by an estimated 70 million
people, was widely seen as favoring the telegenic Kennedy. Civil rights
protest took a new form that February, when four Black freshmen at North
Carolina A&T State University sat down at a whites-only Woolworth’s lunch
counter in Greensboro and refused to leave; the sit-in tactic spread to
dozens of Southern cities within weeks. Cold War tensions flared that May,
when a Soviet missile downed an American U-2 spy plane deep inside Soviet
airspace. The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was captured alive, embarrassing
the Eisenhower administration and collapsing a Paris summit called to ease
relations with Moscow. Consumer prices finished 1960 199.0% above their
1913 level. First-class postage held at 4 cents, and the
minimum wage stayed at $1.00 an hour.
Every 1960 amount converts to 1970 at the same ratio, 1.31: $1,000 becomes
$1,311, and $10,000 becomes $13,108.
Amount in 1960
Value in 1970
$1.00
$1.31
$5.00
$6.55
$10.00
$13.11
$20.00
$26.22
$50.00
$65.54
$100
$131
$500
$655
$1,000
$1,311
$5,000
$6,554
$10,000
$13,108
$100,000
$131,081
$1,000,000
$1,310,811
Inflation by spending category, 1960–1970
Between 1960 and 1970, medical care rose the most, up 52.5%, while energy rose the least, up 13.8%, against 31.1% for all items. The headline number is an average; here is what $100 of 1960
spending costs in 1970, by category:
Category
Avg. yearly inflation
$100 in 1960 →
All items (CPI-U)
2.74%
$131
Medical care
4.31%
$152
Core (all items less food & energy)
2.92%
$133
Food
2.71%
$131
Apparel
2.62%
$130
Transportation
2.32%
$126
Energy
1.30%
$114
Not shown because the BLS began these indexes after 1960: housing (1967–), recreation (1993–), education & communication (1993–).
Year by year: CPI and the value of $100 from 1960
$100 from 1960 had already become $106 by
1965, on its way to $131 in 1970; each row shows the CPI, that
year's inflation rate, and the running value.
Within the span, inflation peaked at 5.7% in 1970, and the smallest rise was 1.0% in 1962.
In 1970, prices rose 5.7% and $100 from 1960 had the buying
power of $131; 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 1960 to 1970: $100 is worth $131 today.” InflationCalculator.com, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U data, https://inflationcalculator.com/inflation/1960-to-1970/
APA: InflationCalculator.com. Inflation from 1960 to 1970. Based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U data. Retrieved from https://inflationcalculator.com/inflation/1960-to-1970/