Value of $100 in 1969, adjusted to 2017

What happened to prices between 1969 and 2017

Between 1969 and 2017, the Consumer Price Index went from 36.7 to 245.12. Cumulatively, prices increased 567.9%, which works out to an average of 4.04% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1969 bought what $0.15 buys in 2017: the 1969 dollar lost 85.0% of its purchasing power over these 48 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.

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The destination year: 2017

In 2017, prices rose 2.1% and $100 from 1969 had the buying power of $668; the year's average CPI of 245.12 is the level behind every 2017 figure on this page.

2017 pushed consumer prices back above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. The CPI rose 2.1%, the first reading over 2% in five years, helped by a rebound in energy after OPEC’s output cuts and by a storm-related spike at the pump: Hurricane Harvey shut a large part of Gulf Coast refining in late August. Gasoline averaged $2.42 a gallon, up from $2.14 in 2016.

Household incomes kept rising. The median household income reached $61,372, and the median new home sold for about $322,100. The federal minimum wage stayed at $7.25, its eighth year at that level, and a first-class stamp rose to 49 cents.

The Fed raised rates three times, to 1.25–1.50%, and in October began letting its bond holdings shrink. Congress passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in December, lowering the corporate rate to 21%. Even with unemployment near 4%, core inflation stayed under 2%, a puzzle that shaped Fed debates for the next two years.

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