Inflation vs. Wage Calculator
Compare a past salary to your current one after accounting for inflation, to see whether a raise actually grew your buying power or just kept pace with rising prices.
Salary history
Result
Enter both salaries and press Calculate.
Nominal vs. real
A nominal raise is the plain percentage between two salary figures. A real raise adjusts for inflation first — it asks what salary would have been needed just to buy what the old salary bought, then compares your actual salary to that number. The inflation rate here is an assumption you set; for actual historical U.S. inflation by year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes CPI data at bls.gov/cpi.