Value of $100 in 2019, adjusted to 2020

What happened to prices between 2019 and 2020

Between 2019 and 2020, the Consumer Price Index went from 255.657 to 258.811. Cumulatively, prices increased 1.2%, which works out to an average of 1.23% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 2019 bought what $0.99 buys in 2020: the 2019 dollar lost 1.2% of its purchasing power over these 1 years.

2019 was the last ordinary year before COVID-19. Consumer prices rose 1.8%, slightly under the Federal Reserve’s 2% target, with gasoline averaging $2.60 a gallon. Median household income jumped to $68,703, the highest on record up to that point, and the median new home sold for about $328,000. A first-class stamp rose to 55 cents.

The Fed reversed course. After four increases in 2018, it cut rates three times, to 1.50–1.75%, citing slower global growth, trade tensions, and low inflation. In July the expansion that began in June 2009 became the longest in U.S. records, and in August the yield curve briefly inverted, a signal investors read as a recession warning.

For workers at the bottom of the pay scale, 2019 marked a milestone of a different kind. The federal minimum wage stayed at $7.25 and reached its tenth year without an increase, the longest gap since the wage was first set. Because prices had climbed about 19% since it was last raised in 2009, its buying power was lower than at any point in that span.

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The destination year: 2020

In 2020, prices rose 1.2% and $100 from 2019 had the buying power of $101; the year's average CPI of 258.811 is the level behind every 2020 figure on this page.

2020 was the year the pandemic rewired the price data without triggering the inflation spike that followed it. Consumer prices rose just 1.2% for the year, the mildest pace since 2015, as COVID-19 lockdowns emptied roads, closed airports, and crushed energy demand. Oil told the starkest story: on April 20, U.S. crude futures fell to about negative $37 a barrel, the first negative settlement in the market’s history, as storage capacity ran out and no one wanted the physical barrels. Gasoline followed it down, falling to about $1.80 a gallon nationally that month before recovering to average $2.17 for the year. Grocery prices moved the other way: pantry stocking and meatpacking-plant disruptions pushed food-at-home costs up faster than usual, a rare case of food and energy pulling the index in opposite directions. Washington answered with the $2.2 trillion CARES Act, signed March 27, which sent $1,200 payments to most adults and added $600 a week to unemployment benefits as states ordered widespread business closures. The Federal Reserve cut its policy rate to near zero in two emergency moves that same month and pledged to buy Treasury and mortgage bonds “in the amounts needed” to keep credit markets working, an open-ended commitment beyond even its 2008 response. None of it showed up in the CPI yet: the stimulus, the supply shocks, and the reopening whiplash that followed would build into the fastest inflation in four decades over the next two years.

More about inflation in 2020 →