$100 in 1968 is worth $111 in 1970,
because prices increased 11.5% over that period, an average of
5.59% a year.
$100 in 1968 has
the same buying power as
$111
in 1970
Detailed inflation statistics
Cumulative price change
11.5%
Average inflation rate
5.59% per year
Converted amount ($100 base)
$111
Price difference ($100 base)
$11.49
CPI in 1968
34.8
CPI in 1970
38.8
Inflation in 1968
4.19%
Inflation in 1970
5.72%
$100 in 1968 → 1970
$111
$100 in 1970 → 1968
$89.69
What happened to prices between 1968 and 1970
Between 1968 and 1970, the Consumer Price Index went from 34.8 to 38.8.
Cumulatively, prices increased 11.5%, which works out to an average of
5.59% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1968 bought what
$0.90 buys in 1970: the 1968 dollar
lost 10.3% of its purchasing power over
these 2 years.
Consumer prices rose 4.2% in 1968, up sharply from 1967’s
3.1% and the fastest pace in 17 years, as Vietnam War spending and a tight
labor market pushed inflation higher despite the Federal Reserve’s
earlier tightening. The year was marked by political violence: Martin
Luther King Jr. was assassinated on a motel balcony in Memphis on April
4, touching off rioting in more than 100 cities, and Robert F. Kennedy was
shot in Los Angeles on June 5, moments after winning California’s
Democratic presidential primary, and died the next day. Washington tried
to answer the inflation problem directly that June 28, when Congress
passed a 10% income tax surcharge, the Revenue and Expenditure Control
Act, temporarily raising taxes and cutting spending to cool an economy
overheated by war and Great Society outlays; prices kept accelerating
anyway. The cost of living rose in smaller, more visible ways too:
first-class postage climbed to 6 cents that January 7, and the minimum
wage rose to $1.60 an hour that February 1, the final step of the
increase Congress had set two years earlier. Consumer prices finished
1968 251.5% above their 1913 level.
Every 1968 amount converts to 1970 at the same ratio, 1.11: $1,000 becomes
$1,115, and $10,000 becomes $11,149.
Amount in 1968
Value in 1970
$1.00
$1.11
$5.00
$5.57
$10.00
$11.15
$20.00
$22.30
$50.00
$55.75
$100
$111
$500
$557
$1,000
$1,115
$5,000
$5,575
$10,000
$11,149
$100,000
$111,494
$1,000,000
$1,114,943
Inflation by spending category, 1968–1970
Between 1968 and 1970, housing rose the most, up 13.7%, while energy rose the least, up 5.4%, against 11.5% for all items. The headline number is an average; here is what $100 of 1968
spending costs in 1970, by category:
Category
Avg. yearly inflation
$100 in 1968 →
All items (CPI-U)
5.59%
$111
Housing
6.65%
$114
Medical care
6.64%
$114
Core (all items less food & energy)
6.02%
$112
Food
5.38%
$111
Apparel
5.00%
$110
Transportation
4.56%
$109
Energy
2.65%
$105
Not shown because the BLS began these indexes after 1968: recreation (1993–), education & communication (1993–).
Year by year: CPI and the value of $100 from 1968
$100 from 1968 had already become $105 by
1969, on its way to $111 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 5.5% in 1969.
In 1970, prices rose 5.7% and $100 from 1968 had the buying
power of $111; 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 1968 to 1970: $100 is worth $111 today.” InflationCalculator.com, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U data, https://inflationcalculator.com/inflation/1968-to-1970/
APA: InflationCalculator.com. Inflation from 1968 to 1970. Based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U data. Retrieved from https://inflationcalculator.com/inflation/1968-to-1970/