$100 in 1967 is worth $116 in 1970,
because prices increased 16.2% over that period, an average of
5.12% a year.
$100 in 1967 has
the same buying power as
$116
in 1970
Detailed inflation statistics
Cumulative price change
16.2%
Average inflation rate
5.12% per year
Converted amount ($100 base)
$116
Price difference ($100 base)
$16.17
CPI in 1967
33.4
CPI in 1970
38.8
Inflation in 1967
3.09%
Inflation in 1970
5.72%
$100 in 1967 → 1970
$116
$100 in 1970 → 1967
$86.08
What happened to prices between 1967 and 1970
Between 1967 and 1970, the Consumer Price Index went from 33.4 to 38.8.
Cumulatively, prices increased 16.2%, which works out to an average of
5.12% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1967 bought what
$0.86 buys in 1970: the 1967 dollar
lost 13.9% of its purchasing power over
these 3 years.
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.
Every 1967 amount converts to 1970 at the same ratio, 1.16: $1,000 becomes
$1,162, and $10,000 becomes $11,617.
Amount in 1967
Value in 1970
$1.00
$1.16
$5.00
$5.81
$10.00
$11.62
$20.00
$23.23
$50.00
$58.08
$100
$116
$500
$581
$1,000
$1,162
$5,000
$5,808
$10,000
$11,617
$100,000
$116,168
$1,000,000
$1,161,677
Inflation by spending category, 1967–1970
Between 1967 and 1970, medical care rose the most, up 20.6%, while energy rose the least, up 7.1%, against 16.2% for all items. The headline number is an average; here is what $100 of 1967
spending costs in 1970, by category:
Category
Avg. yearly inflation
$100 in 1967 →
All items (CPI-U)
5.12%
$116
Medical care
6.43%
$121
Housing
5.73%
$118
Core (all items less food & energy)
5.55%
$118
Apparel
5.10%
$116
Food
4.76%
$115
Transportation
4.04%
$113
Energy
2.33%
$107
Not shown because the BLS began these indexes after 1967: recreation (1993–), education & communication (1993–).
Year by year: CPI and the value of $100 from 1967
$100 from 1967 had already become $104 by
1968, on its way to $116 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 4.2% in 1968.
In 1970, prices rose 5.7% and $100 from 1967 had the buying
power of $116; 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 1967 to 1970: $100 is worth $116 today.” InflationCalculator.com, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U data, https://inflationcalculator.com/inflation/1967-to-1970/
APA: InflationCalculator.com. Inflation from 1967 to 1970. Based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U data. Retrieved from https://inflationcalculator.com/inflation/1967-to-1970/