Methodology

Why the answers disagree

Asking what money is “really” worth is asking a question with more than one correct answer. Measured against consumer prices, a dollar tells you what it buys. Measured against gold, it tells you what it commands of a scarce asset. Measured against a house or a year of median income, it tells you where it puts you relative to other people. These are genuinely different questions, and we keep them apart rather than blending them into a single number.

Consumer purchasing power

The conventional calculation, and the one shown first:

Equivalent value = amount × index at the end date ÷ index at the start date.

We use CPI-U, all items, U.S. city average, not seasonally adjusted, covering January 1913 to August 2026. Not seasonally adjusted is a deliberate choice: seasonal factors are revised every year, so a seasonally adjusted series would change its answer for a past date between one data update and the next.

Units of a benchmark

Units = amount ÷ price per unit.

The same arithmetic gives ounces of gold, median new homes, and years of median household income. A price index has no unit you can hold, so we never express an amount in “units of CPI”.

Investment alternatives

Units bought = amount ÷ price at the start; ending value = units × price at the end.

This answers a different question from purchasing power: not what money could buy, but what it would have become. Two rules constrain it.

• Equity figures use a total-return series, so dividends are reinvested. A price-only index would understate what buying and holding actually returned, and we do not use one to imply investment performance.
• Housing is never presented as an investment return. The home series is a price level. A real return on property would also need rent, maintenance, property tax, insurance, financing and transaction costs, none of which we model.

The equity total-return series is our own construction from published price and dividend data, indexed to 100 at its start. It is not a published index, and it is not the S&P 500.

Comparisons

Both series in a comparison are indexed to 100 at the start of the period, which lets them share one axis. We never draw two y-axes: a second scale can be positioned to make any pair of lines tell almost any story.

When the indexed values span more than two orders of magnitude, the chart switches to a logarithmic scale and says so, because a linear axis would flatten the smaller series onto the baseline. A comparison begins at the first period in which both series exist, which is the later of their two start dates — gold against median new homes starts in January 1963, not in January 1960.

Personal inflation

Weight = your spending in a category ÷ your total spending. Estimate = the sum of each weight × that category’s price change.

You enter dollar amounts and we derive the weights, so nobody has to work out percentages by hand. The eight categories map one-to-one onto the BLS major expenditure groups.

It is an estimate, not a measurement of your cost of living. Within any category your actual purchases differ from the national basket: your rent is not the national shelter index. The comparison also cannot begin before January 1993, because recreation and education & communication were introduced in the 1998 revision of the CPI and are published back to then and no further.

Dates and missing data

Series are published at different frequencies, so a request for a month resolves to the period containing it: a quarterly series answers with its quarter, an annual series with its year. Results show the observation actually used, not the date you asked for.

Nothing is extrapolated, interpolated, or carried forward. If a period is not published, the result says so and explains why rather than showing a zero. Asking what a median new home cost in 1950 returns a statement that the series begins in January 1963 — not a value of nothing.

Known limitations

• The housing series is the median sale price of new houses, not of all homes. New-build medians sit above the all-homes median and move with builder product mix. We label it accordingly everywhere and never call it “the median home”.
• Median household income is published each September for the previous calendar year, so the most recent figure — currently 2024 — can be up to 21 months old. Results show that year rather than implying a current figure.
• There is no live price. Every series is month-end or later, so a figure is never more current than its stated observation.
• Gold is a monthly average of daily quotations, not a spot price on any particular day.

What this is not

Real Value Map provides informational and educational calculations from published historical data. It does not provide investment, tax, legal or financial advice, and it takes no position on which measure you should care about. See the data sources for every series behind these numbers.