Inflation Calculator Australia

Calculator

What $100 from each decade is worth today

Each row shows what $100 at that year's prices would cost now, and what today's $100 would have been worth back then.

Today means 2026 average prices so far. $100 from before 1966 means £50.

The Freddo Frog index

For more than ten years a Freddo Frog cost $1. In August 2024 Cadbury lifted the recommended price to $2, blaming record cocoa prices and higher costs. Everyday prices across the country rose by far less than double over the same stretch, which is why the Freddo jump stung.

The calculator above counts your amount in Freddos at today's $2 price, and shows what a $2 Freddo works out to in the other year's money if it had only risen with general inflation. That's a handy way to picture how far a dollar used to go.

Plenty of people remember paying 20 cents or 50 cents for a Freddo when they were kids. We haven't found a solid record of exactly when those prices applied, so we don't put them in the sums. If you've got an old price sticker or catalogue, we'd love to see it.

Why it matters: it's not just "everything's gone up"

A lot of people shrug and say prices go up, wages go up, so it's all relative. That's half right. Inflation matters because it doesn't hit everything evenly. Whether you're ahead or behind depends on what your money is sitting in and what you're trying to buy.

1. Your pay against prices

Since 2000, average full-time pay in Australia has gone from about $783 a week to about $2,084 a week, roughly 2.7 times as much. Everyday prices went up about 2.1 times. So on average, a full-time worker today can buy a bit more groceries, petrol and power than in 2000. If your own pay hasn't kept up with the calculator, you've gone backwards, even if the number on your payslip is bigger.

2. Money sitting still shrinks

Put $10,000 under the mattress in 2000, and today it buys what about $4,840 bought back then. You didn't lose a cent you can count, but you lost more than half of what it could do. That's why savings need to earn more than inflation just to stand still.

3. Some things have raced away from wages

Here's the bit the "it's all relative" crowd misses. In 2000, a year's average full-time pay (about $40,700) bought around 85 ounces of gold, at roughly $480 an ounce. In November 2026, a year's pay (about $108,000) buys only about 19 ounces, at around $5,700 an ounce. Pay went up 2.7 times, but measured in gold it buys less than a quarter of what it did.

Gold isn't money any more and its price jumps around, so don't take it as gospel. But the same pattern shows up in houses and shares. Things people own as investments have risen much faster than wages. That's a big part of why a lot of people feel poorer even though they earn more: their pay keeps up with the shopping, but not with the things that build wealth.

4. Change the measuring stick

Counting in dollars hides all this, because the dollar itself keeps shrinking. Counting in something else, like hours of work, ounces of gold, or Freddo Frogs, shows what's really changed. That's the whole idea behind the Freddo index above.

Want to know where you stand? Our salary inflation calculator checks your own pay against prices, groceries, rent, other workers and house prices.

Pay figures: ABS Average Weekly Earnings, full-time adult ordinary time earnings, May 2000 and May 2026. Gold: 2000 yearly average in Australian dollars, and the spot price in mid-November 2026.

How this inflation calculator works

It uses the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which the Australian Bureau of Statistics puts out every quarter. The CPI tracks the price of a typical basket of things households buy, like food, rent, petrol, power, clothes and health care. When the index goes up, money buys less.

That makes it a purchasing power calculator (some people call it a buying power calculator): it shows how much your money can actually buy in different years, not just the number on the note.

For each year we take the average of that year's four quarterly figures. To move an amount from one year to another, the calculator multiplies it by the later year's index and divides by the earlier year's. For example, if the index was 50 in one year and 100 in another, prices doubled, so $10 back then is like $20 now.

The current year is the average of the quarters released so far, so it shifts a little as each new figure comes out.

What the result means

The answer is what it would cost today to buy the same mix of everyday things your amount bought back then. It's an average across everything, so some things (like houses, rent or chocolate) have gone up a lot faster, and others (like TVs and phone calls) have got much cheaper.

Amounts before 1966

Australia switched from pounds to dollars on 14 February 1966, at two dollars to the pound. For earlier years, enter the amount in dollars: £1 becomes $2, and ten shillings becomes $1.

Common questions