About Dollar Value Box

Dollar Value Box answers one question quickly: what is money from the past worth today? Every number on the site comes from official U.S. government price data, updated every month. The latest data is for August 2026.

Where the data comes from

• The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U), published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. We use the U.S. city average, all items, not seasonally adjusted (series CUUR0000SA0), monthly since January 1913.
• 68 category indexes (food, rent, gasoline, college tuition and more) and 27 metro area and regional indexes from the same survey.

How we calculate

• Value today = amount × (CPI for the latest month ÷ CPI for the starting date). For a whole year we use BLS's annual average CPI.
• A year's inflation rate is the change in annual average CPI from the year before.
• Average yearly inflation is the compound rate that turns the starting CPI into today's CPI over the years in between.
• BLS did not collect October 2025 prices because of the federal government shutdown. Where that month is needed we use the average of September and November 2025.

Limits

CPI measures the average household's basket of spending in cities. Your own costs may have risen faster or slower depending on where you live and what you buy. The site is for information only and is not financial advice.

Spotted an error? Let us know.