Between 1967 and 2022, the Consumer Price Index went from 33.4 to 292.655.
Cumulatively, prices increased 776.2%, which works out to an average of
4.03% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1967 bought what
$0.11 buys in 2022.
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.
The headline number is an average. Individual categories moved very differently over this
period. Here is what $100 of 1967 spending costs in 2022, by category:
Category
Avg. yearly inflation
$100 in 1967 →
All items (CPI-U)
4.03%
$876
Medical care
5.54%
$1,938
Energy
4.70%
$1,253
Housing
4.23%
$977
Food
4.07%
$896
Core (all items less food & energy)
3.96%
$848
Transportation
3.85%
$800
Apparel
1.67%
$249
Not shown because the BLS began these indexes after 1967: recreation (1993–), education & communication (1993–).
Long periods are sampled every 2 years; the calculator above covers any pair of years.
The destination year: 2022
2022 was the year inflation returned. Consumer prices rose 8.0% on average,
the worst since 1981, driven by pandemic-era supply chains, stimulus-fueled
demand, and an energy shock from the war in Ukraine. Gas briefly topped $5 a
gallon nationally for the first time ever, and “inflation” became the
top-ranked economic concern in nearly every poll of American households.
MLA: “Inflation from 1967 to 2022: $100 is worth $876 today.” InflationCalculator.com, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U data, https://inflationcalculator.com/inflation/1967-to-2022/
APA: InflationCalculator.com. Inflation from 1967 to 2022. Based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U data. Retrieved from https://inflationcalculator.com/inflation/1967-to-2022/