Salary Inflation Calculator — what is your salary worth today?
See what an old salary is worth in today's money, whether your raise beat inflation, how your pay has really grown over your career, and what you need to earn to keep up. Official consumer price index (CPI) data for 27 countries, 1970–2025. Free, no sign-up, nothing leaves your browser.
Value over time
Prices rose in…
Each country is measured in its own currency, so this compares how fast prices rose, not exchange rates or wage levels.
Inflation in , year by year
Year-by-year table
Guide — is your salary keeping up with inflation?
Type the amount and choose / year, / month, / week or / hour. Gross or net both work, as long as you compare like with like.
The year you earned it and the country whose prices you paid. 27 countries, back to 1970 for most.
The salary in today's money, how much prices rose, the average inflation per year and how much buying power is left.
Switch to Did my raise beat inflation?, add what you earn now and get a clear yes or no, plus the salary you would need to break even.
Share link reopens the exact calculation; Download CSV gives you every year in a spreadsheet.
What the calculator can do
What €2,000 a month in 2010 or $40,000 a year in 1995 would have to be today to buy the same things.
- Any year
- Also backwards: what today's pay was worth in 1990
- Buying power
- How much of the old salary a frozen paycheck still buys
Your raise next to price growth over the same years, the real change in buying power and the break-even salary.
- Verdict
- Ahead or behind, in percent and in money
- Gap
- Per year and per month
Enter what you earned in several years and see every amount in today's money, so you can tell real progress from inflation.
- Real growth
- Average per year, after inflation
- Chart
- Nominal pay against real pay
Project your salary forward with your own inflation estimate — prefilled with the country's 10-year average — and see whether a planned raise keeps up.
- Target
- Salary needed in each future year
United States, euro area, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, China, India, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Austria, Portugal, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Poland.
- Old currencies
- Belgian franc, Deutsche Mark, guilder, franc, peseta, lira, punt, schilling and escudo convert at the official euro rate
All data is built into the page and every calculation runs in your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere.
How to calculate what a salary is worth today
Multiply the old salary by the price index of today, divided by the price index of the year you earned it. If prices are 60% higher now than in the year you earned €30,000, that salary is worth €30,000 × 1.60 = €48,000 in today's money. The price index used here is the consumer price index (CPI), the official measure of how much a typical basket of goods and services costs — food, rent, energy, transport, clothing, healthcare and so on.
salary today = old salary × CPI(today) ÷ CPI(then)
The same ratio tells you how much buying power a frozen salary has lost: CPI(then) ÷ CPI(today). If prices rose 60%, an unchanged paycheck buys 1 ÷ 1.6 = 62.5% of what it used to, a loss of 37.5%.
What one unit of money from the past is worth in 2025
Multiply any amount by these factors to get its value in 2025 money. One dollar earned in 2000 in the United States equals $1.87 in 2025, for example.
| Country | 1980 | 1990 | 2000 | 2010 | 2015 | 2020 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 3.91 | 2.46 | 1.87 | 1.48 | 1.36 | 1.24 |
| Euro area (average) | — | — | 1.69 | 1.38 | 1.29 | 1.23 |
| United Kingdom | 4.55 | 2.51 | 1.88 | 1.53 | 1.38 | 1.27 |
| Canada | 3.73 | 2.10 | 1.72 | 1.41 | 1.30 | 1.20 |
| Australia | 5.41 | 2.48 | 2.00 | 1.48 | 1.32 | 1.23 |
| Belgium | 3.42 | 2.19 | 1.79 | 1.46 | 1.34 | 1.23 |
| Netherlands | 2.90 | 2.28 | 1.79 | 1.47 | 1.35 | 1.25 |
| Germany | 2.64 | 2.04 | 1.61 | 1.38 | 1.29 | 1.22 |
| France | 3.30 | 1.79 | 1.51 | 1.28 | 1.21 | 1.15 |
| Spain | 6.34 | 2.60 | 1.78 | 1.35 | 1.27 | 1.22 |
| Italy | 5.93 | 2.36 | 1.63 | 1.32 | 1.23 | 1.19 |
| Ireland | 4.48 | 2.13 | 1.66 | 1.30 | 1.24 | 1.22 |
| Switzerland | 1.95 | 1.40 | 1.15 | 1.06 | 1.08 | 1.07 |
| Sweden | 4.18 | 2.01 | 1.60 | 1.38 | 1.33 | 1.24 |
| Japan | 1.53 | 1.25 | 1.15 | 1.18 | 1.14 | 1.12 |
| India | 23.93 | 10.16 | 4.29 | 2.33 | 1.59 | 1.27 |
Did my raise beat inflation?
Compare your raise with inflation over the same period, and do it by dividing, not subtracting: real change = (new salary ÷ old salary) ÷ (CPI now ÷ CPI then) − 1. A raise from 40,000 to 46,000 is +15%. If prices rose 12% in the same years, your real raise is 1.15 ÷ 1.12 − 1 = +2.7% — you are slightly better off. If prices rose 20%, it is 1.15 ÷ 1.20 − 1 = −4.2%: more money, but it buys less. The break-even salary is the old salary times the price increase — anything below it is a pay cut in real terms.
Nominal and real salary
Your nominal salary is the number on your payslip. Your real salary is that number corrected for prices, expressed in the money of one chosen year. Over a career, nominal pay almost always goes up; real pay can stand still or fall. The My salary history tab puts all your past salaries in today's money, which is the honest way to see whether you have actually progressed.
Using inflation in a salary negotiation
Cumulative inflation since your last real raise is the floor of a negotiation, not the goal. If your salary has not changed since 2021 and prices in your country have risen 18% since then, you are earning 15% less in real terms than when you agreed on it. Quote the break-even salary from the raise check and the source of the data — the national statistics office or the World Bank — and keep the argument about the work separate from the argument about prices. For the year ahead, the Raise I need next year tab shows the minimum raise to stand still at a given inflation rate.
Automatic wage indexation
Some countries link wages to prices by law or by collective agreement. Belgium is the best-known example: most salaries are indexed automatically, using the "health index", a version of CPI without tobacco, alcohol and fuel, smoothed over several months. Luxembourg has a similar system. That means a Belgian salary roughly follows CPI by design, and the calculator shows how much of a raise is indexation and how much is real. Indexation rules differ by sector (joint committee), so the exact month and percentage of your own indexation can differ from the national CPI used here.
Why your own inflation may differ
CPI is an average. If you rent in a city where rents rose faster than prices in general, or you drive a lot when fuel prices spike, your personal inflation is higher than the national figure; if you own your home outright, it may be lower. CPI also measures prices, not living standards: it does not include house prices, and it compares a fixed basket of goods while what people buy changes over time. Treat the result as a solid, official benchmark rather than an exact measure of your own situation.
Comparing countries
The country comparison shows how much prices rose in each country, each in its own currency. It answers "where did prices rise fastest?", not "where would I earn more?". To compare salaries between countries you need exchange rates and price levels (purchasing power parity), which this calculator deliberately leaves out. Brazil starts in 1995 and Poland in 1995, after their currency reforms; Mexico starts in 1993 and China in 1986.
Salaries from before the euro
For Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Austria and Portugal, results are always shown in euro. For a year before 2002, tick Amount is in old currency and type the amount in Belgian francs, guilders, Deutsche Mark, French francs, pesetas, lire, Irish pounds, schillings or escudos. It is converted at the fixed rate set when the euro was introduced (for example 40.3399 Belgian francs or 1.95583 Deutsche Mark to one euro) and then adjusted for inflation.
Where the data comes from
Annual average consumer price index for each country from the World Bank (indicator FP.CPI.TOTL, compiled from national statistics offices and the IMF), the euro area harmonised index of consumer prices (HICP) from Eurostat, and for the United States in 2025 the annual average CPI-U from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Annual averages smooth out month-to-month swings, so the figures here may differ by a few tenths from a December-to-December rate quoted in the news. The latest full year is 2025; values for 2026 will be added once full-year figures are published.
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