Has your pay kept up with inflation?
Compare a past and a current salary or hourly wage in today's dollars, and against average US wage growth.
How it works
The calculator converts your earlier pay into today's dollars with the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, using annual averages; for the current year, the average of the months published so far. If your current pay is higher than that figure, your purchasing power has grown; if it is lower, inflation has eaten into it.
Where the data allow, it also compares your experience with the average: the growth of average hourly earnings for all private-sector employees, from the BLS establishment survey. Averages hide wide differences between industries and between low- and high-paid workers, and they do not account for taxes, benefits or changes in hours.
Wages and prices in the official data
The latest figures are on the wage growth and inflation data pages, which are updated automatically when BLS publishes.