Rising Throne

BrandsHistorical money calculator

ValueThen

Put historical money in perspective.

Compare purchasing power across years and currencies, follow gold back to 1258 and silver to 1688, and read the source behind every figure.

Open valuethen.comCLI on GitHubSDK on npm

$100 in 1970 buys what

$829.75

buys in 2025

Prices rose 729.8%, about 3.9% a year.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, CPI-U annual average (CUUR0000SA0).

U.S. dollars, using the BLS CPI-U annual averages that ValueThen publishes.

What it does

What was a 1970 salary worth? What did a medieval price mean? ValueThen answers with consumer price indices and central-bank exchange rates, at month-level precision wherever a country publishes a monthly index.

Every result names its series. When a source does not cover a period, ValueThen says so instead of inventing a number. Historical places are never assigned a modern currency they did not use.

The same engine is open to developers through a free API, and through a CLI and SDK on npm: run npx valuethen convert 100 USD 1970 and get the answer with its sources.

ValueThen in the news

  1. ValueThen

    ValueThen now compares two places across the same years

    Pick two places and one period, and see how prices changed in each, side by side, with both sources cited.

  2. ValueThen

    ValueThen’s purchasing-power API, now from your terminal

    An open-source CLI and SDK on npm. No API key, no sign-up and no dependencies.