Purchasing power calculator
How much has inflation eroded the value of your money since 2000?
How to use this tool
Understanding purchasing power erosion
Purchasing power is the real value of money — what it can actually buy. When inflation runs at 5% per year, a basket of goods costing $100 today will cost $105 next year. Over a decade, that same basket costs $163 — a 63% increase. Your money buys 37% less than it did 10 years ago.
This is why holding cash long-term is a losing strategy. Even at the US's modest average of ~2.4%/year, $10,000 saved in 2000 has the purchasing power of only ~$5,880 today — you would need about $17,000 in a 2026 wallet to buy what $10,000 bought in 2000. In high-inflation economies like Turkey or Argentina, the erosion is catastrophic within just a few years.
Methodology
This calculator answers: "how much money would I need today to buy what a given amount bought in an earlier year?" We compound each year's actual inflation rate sequentially — not a flat average — since inflation compounds year over year, the same way interest does.
Converting $10,000 from 2020 to 2023 using actual US annual rates (1.2%, 4.7%, 8.0%):
$10,000 × 1.012 × 1.047 × 1.080 = $11,449 — the same purchasing power as $10,000 had in 2020.
We report local-currency inflation only — no foreign-exchange conversion is applied. Switching currency simply switches which country's CPI series is used. Sources: Data Sources.