Inflation Calculator

Inflation eats your savings every year. Your bank statement won't show it, but this calculator will.

Enter your balance, your bank's interest rate, and a time horizon. You'll see exactly how much purchasing power you lose.

Last updated Mar 2026

▪ Enter your details

01 Your savings balance

02 Your bank's interest rate (APY)

03 Your time horizon

🔒 Everything you enter stays in your browser. We don't store, collect, or see any of it.

▸ Inflation rate: 3.4% per year (20-year US CPI average)

Want to use your own rate?

Leave blank to use 3.4%

Your savings balance's real value in 10 years

$7,240

That's $2,760 you quietly lost to inflation.

Your account will show $14,700, but it will only buy what $7,240 buys today.

▪ The 3.4% doesn't tell the whole story

2021 7.0% 40-year high. Highest annual rate since 1981

2022 6.5% full-year rate; hit 9.1% in June before energy prices pulled it back

2023 3.4% cooled, but still above the long-term average

2024 2.9% held above the Fed's 2% target all year

2025 2.7% continued cooling; Oct. data unavailable due to gov't shutdown — est. Dec-to-Dec

3-year average (2021–2023): 5.6%. Nearly double the 3.4% this tool uses as its baseline.

If the next 5 years look more like 2021–2023 than the long-term average, the real cost to your savings is considerably higher than what you see above.

▪ Take it further

What if you'd put this money into Bitcoin instead?

The DCA calculator runs the same amount against actual historical Bitcoin prices. Pick your timeframe and compare the results side by side.

Run the Bitcoin DCA calculator →

The inflation calculation

Real Value = Nominal Value × ((1 + interest rate) / (1 + inflation rate))^years. This adjusts your bank's stated growth for the purchasing power you lose to rising prices each year.

Why 3.4%?

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics measures CPI (Consumer Price Index), the average change in prices you pay for goods and services. Over the last 20 years, CPI has averaged about 3.4% per year. That's the default here. Recent years ran higher: 7.0% in 2021, 6.5% in 2022. You can override the rate if you want a different assumption.

The Bitcoin comparison

The Bitcoin side uses actual year-end closing prices from 2014 through 2024 and simulates investing your monthly equivalent once per year at that price. A simplified model; real DCA would be monthly. Past performance does not predict future results, and Bitcoin is volatile.

Data sources

Inflation data: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (bls.gov). Bitcoin prices: historical closing prices via CoinGecko.