$100 in 1969 is worth $106 in 1970,
because prices increased 5.7% over that period, an average of
5.72% a year.
$100 in 1969 has
the same buying power as
$106
in 1970
Detailed inflation statistics
Cumulative price change
5.7%
Average inflation rate
5.72% per year
Converted amount ($100 base)
$106
Price difference ($100 base)
$5.72
CPI in 1969
36.7
CPI in 1970
38.8
Inflation in 1969
5.46%
Inflation in 1970
5.72%
$100 in 1969 → 1970
$106
$100 in 1970 → 1969
$94.59
What happened to prices between 1969 and 1970
Between 1969 and 1970, the Consumer Price Index went from 36.7 to 38.8.
Cumulatively, prices increased 5.7%, which works out to an average of
5.72% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1969 bought what
$0.95 buys in 1970: the 1969 dollar
lost 5.4% of its purchasing power over
these 1 years.
Consumer prices rose 5.5% in 1969, up from 1968’s 4.2% and
the fastest pace since the Korean War era, as years of Vietnam War
spending, a labor market with unemployment under 4%, and expansionary
fiscal policy finally showed up fully in prices. Richard Nixon was
inaugurated that January 20, pledging to curb rising prices without wage
and price controls, a position he would reverse within two years. The
decade’s most triumphant moment came that July 20, when Neil Armstrong
and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon while Michael Collins orbited above,
fulfilling the goal Kennedy had set in 1961 of landing a man on the lunar
surface before the decade’s end. Culture and protest both reached new
extremes that year: an estimated 400,000 people gathered on a dairy farm
in Bethel, New York, for the Woodstock music festival that August, and a
police raid on the Stonewall Inn in New York’s Greenwich Village that
June touched off days of resistance now credited with launching the
modern gay rights movement. Consumer prices finished the decade 270.7%
above their 1913 level, up 24.0% from where they stood in
1960. The 1960s had opened with inflation near 1% a year and closed with
prices rising faster than at any point since Korea, setting up the Great
Inflation that would define the
1970s. First-class postage held at 6 cents, and the minimum wage stayed
at $1.60 an hour.
Every 1969 amount converts to 1970 at the same ratio, 1.06: $1,000 becomes
$1,057, and $10,000 becomes $10,572.
Amount in 1969
Value in 1970
$1.00
$1.06
$5.00
$5.29
$10.00
$10.57
$20.00
$21.14
$50.00
$52.86
$100
$106
$500
$529
$1,000
$1,057
$5,000
$5,286
$10,000
$10,572
$100,000
$105,722
$1,000,000
$1,057,221
Inflation by spending category, 1969–1970
Between 1969 and 1970, housing rose the most, up 7.1%, while energy rose the least, up 2.8%, against 5.7% for all items. The headline number is an average; here is what $100 of 1969
spending costs in 1970, by category:
Category
Avg. yearly inflation
$100 in 1969 →
All items (CPI-U)
5.72%
$106
Housing
7.06%
$107
Medical care
6.58%
$107
Core (all items less food & energy)
6.25%
$106
Food
5.66%
$106
Transportation
5.04%
$105
Apparel
4.23%
$104
Energy
2.82%
$103
Not shown because the BLS began these indexes after 1969: recreation (1993–), education & communication (1993–).
Year by year: CPI and the value of $100 from 1969
$100 from 1969grew to $106 by 1970; each row
shows the CPI, that year's inflation rate, and the running value.
In 1970, prices rose 5.7% and $100 from 1969 had the buying
power of $106; 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 1969 to 1970: $100 is worth $106 today.” InflationCalculator.com, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U data, https://inflationcalculator.com/inflation/1969-to-1970/
APA: InflationCalculator.com. Inflation from 1969 to 1970. Based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U data. Retrieved from https://inflationcalculator.com/inflation/1969-to-1970/