CPI baskets change every few years and every country calculates inflation differently. Gold has been used as a store of value for thousands of years. This tool converts a sum of money from any year into ounces of gold, then reprices it in today's money — so you can compare wages, prices, or savings across decades on a harder yardstick.
Enter an amount, its currency, and the year it's from. See what it's worth today, priced in gold.
Bought this much gold in that year
—
Equivalent today, gold-priced
—
Compare two incomes directly
e.g. your father's 1975 salary against your own today — both measured in grams of gold rather than currency.
compared with
Amount A
—
Amount B
—
Gold price over time
Price per troy ounce, log scale. Germany shown in EUR throughout — pre-1999 DM figures converted at the fixed 1.95583 rate.
USA — USDGermany — EUR
Median income, measured in gold
Grams of gold the median income buys. USA: median household income (US Census Bureau). Germany: median gross annual earnings (Stat. Bundesamt); West Germany data pre-1990. Figures are approximate.
USAGermany
How this works
1. Take the amount and look up gold's average price, in the same currency, for that year.
2. Divide → the amount is now expressed in troy ounces of gold.
3. Multiply the ounces by today's gold price (in your target currency) → today's gold-priced equivalent.
Gold and exchange-rate figures here are annual averages baked into the page, not a live feed — good enough for "what was this roughly worth", not for trading or legal/tax use. Use the dedicated "DM — Deutsche Mark" option for real pre-1999 German amounts (e.g. a 1975 salary) — enter the actual Deutschmark figure directly, no manual conversion needed. The EUR option is meant for 1999 onward; it also computes for earlier years via the fixed conversion rate (1 EUR = 1.95583 DEM), but that only makes sense if the amount you're entering is already a retroactively-converted euro figure, which is unusual. Currency conversion only starts in 1950 — for earlier years, choose USD or work in gold ounces directly.
This site has no server and stores nothing about you — everything runs in your browser.