Money through time
What that sum was actually worth
"The swindler stole £300" means nothing on its own. £300 in 1862 was 7.3 years of a building labourer's work, or the price of an average house. That lands.
The sum in the record
Read as pound sterling. Converted to pounds at 2025 prices, the latest complete year.
What it was worth
Enter the sum as it appears in the record, then press Show what it was worth.
Why one number is never enough
Most converters give a single figure: the retail price answer. It asks what the same shopping basket costs now, and for short spans it is the right answer. Stretch it across two centuries and it quietly misleads, because wages rose far faster than prices. Ordinary people got richer, so a sum that once represented a decade of somebody's labour now buys a used car.
Take the worked example. £300 in 1862, written at the time as £300, comes to £31,950 at 2025 prices. Measured against wages instead, the same £300 was 9.2 years of average earnings, which is £355,670 of today's average pay. Both numbers are correct. The first tells you what the thief could buy; the second tells you what the theft meant to the person robbed. For a story about a crime, the second is usually the number the audience feels.
Worked example: £300 in 1862
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| At 2025 retail prices | £31,950 |
| Average earnings for a full year, 1862 | £32.48 |
| Years of average earnings | 9.2 |
| Same share of average earnings today | £355,670 |
| Average house price, 1862 | £288 |
| Average houses it bought | 1.0 |
| Days of a building labourer's work, at 33d a day | 2,194 (7.3 years) |
| Days of a building craftsman's work, at 50d a day | 1,426 (4.8 years) |
| Four pound loaves of bread | 10,105 |
| Pints of strong beer | 27,764 |
A Victorian jury would have heard £300 the way a modern one hears a decade of somebody's salary. It is also why the same theft reads differently on either side of the Atlantic: $1,000 taken in 1873, the year Jay Cooke's bank failed, is $26,875 at 2025 prices and 2.3 years of what an American worker then earned in a year.
What each currency covers
| Currency | Years | Prices | Wages | Goods and day wages |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| British pound (£) | 1209 to 2025 | yes | from 1209 | England, 1600 to 1914 |
| US dollar ($) | 1800 to 2025 | yes | from 1870 | not yet |
| French franc (F) | 1870 to 2025 | yes | from 1870 | not yet |
| German mark (ℳ) | 1871 to 2025 | yes | from 1870 | not yet |
| Dutch guilder (ƒ) | 1870 to 2025 | yes | from 1870 | not yet |
| Italian lira (₤) | 1870 to 2025 | yes | from 1870 | not yet |
The English retail prices and day wages come from a single scholarly series that has no equivalent yet for the other countries here, so the loaves-of-bread layer is British only. Everything else works for all six. Sums before 1870 outside Britain and America are the main gap: pre-unification Italy and pre-1871 Germany used a shifting collection of local currencies that no single series can carry.
How the conversion works
The retail figure is the amount multiplied by the ratio of two consumer price index readings. The wage figure divides the amount by average annual earnings in that year, which gives the number of years an ordinary worker had to work for it. The property figure divides by the average house price of the year. None of the three is adjusted, smoothed or blended.
Currency changes are handled before the arithmetic, not after. A franc of 1870 is an old franc, so it is divided by 100 for the 1960 redenomination and then by 6.55957 for the euro. A mark of 1913 passes through the 1923 hyperinflation at a trillion to one and then the euro conversion. The year 1923 itself is excluded: an annual average is meaningless when prices rise a billionfold inside twelve months.
What this cannot tell you
Baskets change. A pound in 1750 bought bread, candles and rent, and no antibiotics, refrigeration or electricity at any price. Comparing across that gap is an approximation, and the further back you go the rougher it gets. The Bundesbank makes the same point about its own figures: one 1882 mark converts to anywhere between two and twenty-four euros depending on whether you measure it in flour or potatoes. Treat any single number as an order of magnitude, which is exactly what a narrative needs.
Two more caveats worth naming on camera. Average earnings are an average: a dock labourer, a domestic servant and a country curate all sat well below the mean, so a theft measured in their wages runs longer than the average figure suggests. And the pre-1968 house price series is carried back on a building-cost index rather than recorded sales, so treat Victorian house numbers as indicative.
Questions
Which number should I use in a video about a fraud?
The wage one, usually, and say what it is. "Three hundred pounds, about ten years' wages for a labourer" is concrete and hard to argue with. The retail-price figure is the better choice when the money was spent on goods, a cargo, a shipment, a house, rather than stolen from a person's living.
Why does your figure differ from other inflation calculators?
Different underlying price series, mostly. Long-run indices are reconstructions, and reputable ones disagree by a few per cent for the 19th century and more before that. This page uses the Bank of England series for Britain and the Minneapolis Fed series for America, and both are cited below so you can check them.
Can I convert pounds, shillings and pence?
Enter the amount in decimal pounds: three shillings is 0.15, half a crown is 0.125, a guinea is 1.05. The result restates your entry in the old notation so you can confirm you typed what you meant.
Why does the year 1923 fail for German marks?
Because German prices rose by a factor of roughly a trillion during it. An annual average for that year describes no real moment, so a conversion built on one would be a fabrication. Use 1922 or 1924 and say which.
How current is "today"?
The latest complete calendar year in each source, which is 2025 for the pound. Part-year figures are not used, so the answer does not drift between page loads.
Where this comes from
The rules on this page that are specific rather than general are cited below. Follow a link to read the provision itself rather than taking our word for it:
- UK consumer prices and average weekly earnings, 1209 to 2016Bank of England, A millennium of macroeconomic data, table A47
- UK consumer prices and average weekly earnings, 2016 onwardsONS series D7BT (CPI, 2015=100) and KAB9 (average weekly earnings)
- UK average house price from 1968, and the index used to carry it back to 1845HM Land Registry UK House Price Index; Bank of England table A32medium confidence
- English retail prices and day wages, 1600 to 1914Gregory Clark, England prices and wages since the 13th centurymedium confidence
- US consumer prices from 1800Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Consumer Price Index 1800 to present
- Prices, wages and house prices for the US, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy, 1870 to 2020Jorda, Schularick and Taylor Macrohistory Database, release 6
- Euro-area consumer prices after 2020Eurostat, harmonised index of consumer prices, annual average (prc_hicp_aind)
- Average annual earnings levels used to anchor the wage series outside the UKOECD, average annual wages, national currency, current prices
Related tools
- How rich would I be if… the same money compounded instead
- Net worth what a fortune looks like today
- Lifetime tax paid a career's worth of one number
A history and research tool, not financial advice. Long-run price and wage series are scholarly estimates, and the further back the year, the wider the honest error bar.