A dollar saved in 1913 and left untouched would buy about 3% of what it bought then, because the Consumer Price Index has climbed from 9.9 to 321.9 over that stretch. That is the entire history of the dollar’s purchasing power in one ratio: a long, almost uninterrupted decline, occasionally paused or even reversed for a few years at a time, then resuming. The calculator turns that ratio into a dollar figure for any two years; this page walks through when the decline was steepest, the rare stretches it ran backward, and what a dollar actually bought at each turn.
The path, decade marker by decade marker
Indexing the CPI to 1913 shows how unevenly the erosion happened. The same $100 from 1913, tracked forward, would need to grow to the following amounts just to keep pace with prices:
| Year | CPI-U (annual average) | $100 from 1913 would need to be |
|---|---|---|
| 1913 | 9.9 | $100 |
| 1933 | 13.0 | $131 |
| 1945 | 18.0 | $182 |
| 1971 | 40.5 | $409 |
| 1980 | 82.4 | $832 |
| 1990 | 130.7 | $1,320 |
| 2000 | 172.2 | $1,739 |
| 2009 | 214.5 | $2,167 |
| 2022 | 292.7 | $2,956 |
| 2025 | 321.9 | $3,252 |
Put the other way, a 1913 dollar’s purchasing power had fallen to roughly 3.1 cents by 2025. Run the 1913-to-2025 comparison to see the exact figure, or read what purchasing power means if the mechanics behind that ratio aren’t already familiar.
The years it ran backward
Prices don’t only rise. Between 1929 and 1933, the CPI fell from 17.1 to 13.0, a nearly 24% drop, as bank failures and collapsing demand during the Great Depression forced merchants to cut prices just to sell anything. A dollar held in cash through those four years gained purchasing power rather than losing it, which sounds like good news until the context is added: wages and asset values were falling just as fast or faster, so the same deflation that made a saved dollar stretch further also made debts effectively heavier and jobs harder to keep. The only other full-year decline in the modern series came in 2009, when the CPI slipped 0.4% as the Great Recession and a collapsing oil price pulled the index down for twelve months before growth resumed. Outside those two episodes, the dollar’s purchasing power has fallen in every single year back to 1913, including every year since 1972 without exception.
1971 and the end of the anchor
For most of the dollar’s history through 1971, the United States linked the currency to gold at a fixed rate, a system that constrained how much the money supply could expand. President Nixon suspended that convertibility in August 1971, and the years that followed carried some of the fastest purchasing-power losses in the CPI record: the index rose from 40.5 in 1971 to 82.4 by 1980, doubling in under a decade as oil shocks, Vietnam-era deficits, and accommodative Fed policy fed one another. By 1981, Paul Volcker’s Federal Reserve had broken that cycle by pushing interest rates toward 20%, the most aggressive purchasing-power defense the Fed has ever mounted, at the cost of back-to-back recessions.
What a dollar actually bought, at four points in time
Index numbers are abstract; prices for the same everyday goods make the erosion concrete. A first-class stamp, priced by the USPS, cost 2 cents in 1913; by 1980 it was 15 cents, by 2009 44 cents, and by 2022, 60 cents. Gasoline moved the same direction: the Energy Information Administration put the 1980 annual average at $1.19 a gallon, the 2009 average at $2.35, and the 2022 average at $3.95. Home prices moved fastest of all: in 1980 the Census Bureau’s median new-home sale price was $64,600, and by 2022 it had reached $442,600, a nearly sevenfold jump. None of these track the CPI exactly, since housing, energy, and postage each move at their own pace inside the broader basket, but all three point the same direction the index does: steadily fewer of them per dollar as the decades pass.
Why this matters beyond the history lesson
A currency that loses purchasing power every year by default is the reason wages, pensions, and Social Security benefits are built to rise alongside prices rather than stay fixed, and the reason cash sitting idle is one of the worst-performing assets over any multi-decade stretch, as detailed in how inflation erodes savings. It is also why a single year like 2022, with inflation averaging 8.0%, registers as a crisis: it is the same erosion the dollar has absorbed since 1913, just compressed into twelve months instead of spread across a lifetime. Compare what any amount from any year is worth today to see where a specific dollar figure falls on this century-long curve.
Sources
Annual CPI-U (CUUR0000SA0) figures come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Postage history is from the USPS; gasoline prices from the U.S. Energy Information Administration; home prices from the U.S. Census Bureau. Full citations for each year’s figures are on the corresponding year hub.