Value of $100 in 1984, adjusted to 2024

What happened to prices between 1984 and 2024

Between 1984 and 2024, the Consumer Price Index went from 103.9 to 313.689. Cumulatively, prices increased 201.9%, which works out to an average of 2.80% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1984 bought what $0.33 buys in 2024: the 1984 dollar lost 66.9% of its purchasing power over these 40 years.

1984 was the year the recovery became a boom. Real GDP grew 7.2%, the fastest calendar-year growth since 1951, as the tax cuts passed in 1981 combined with falling interest rates and rebuilding consumer confidence. Unemployment, which had topped 10.8% just two years earlier, fell below 7.5%. Inflation ticked up to 4.3% from 3.2% the year before, but nothing close to a return of the 1970s wage-price spiral: the Federal Reserve under Paul Volcker kept policy tight enough to hold the line while growth ran hot. The strength of the expansion, branded “Morning in America” in President Reagan’s reelection campaign, carried him to a 49-state landslide over Walter Mondale that November, at the time the widest electoral-vote margin in U.S. history. For households, the numbers behind the slogan were concrete: median income rose to about $22,400, and a gallon of gas cost $1.13, roughly what it had cost three years earlier even as wages kept climbing. The contrast with 1980, when 13.5% inflation and interest rates near 20% had defined the economy, could not have been sharper.

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The destination year: 2024

In 2024, prices rose 2.9% and $100 from 1984 had the buying power of $302; the year's average CPI of 313.689 is the level behind every 2024 figure on this page.

2024 brought inflation close to normal without fully reaching it. Consumer prices rose 2.9% on average, the smallest yearly increase since 2020, and the December-to-December rate was also 2.9%. Gasoline averaged $3.30 a gallon, below 2023’s $3.52. Shelter stayed the biggest driver of the index, so the pace of price growth in categories that households can’t easily avoid, such as rent and insurance, lagged the drop in goods and energy costs.

The Federal Reserve declared progress in September, cutting its policy rate by half a point, the first reduction since the pandemic emergency, and then by a quarter point in November and again in December. Mortgage rates near 7% kept the housing market frozen for many would-be buyers.

Median household income was $83,730, the federal minimum wage stayed at $7.25, and a first-class stamp rose to 73 cents in July. After the November election, attention turned to how announced tariffs and tax policy might affect prices in 2025.

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