£100 in 1905 is worth £100 in 1903

Buying power of £100 in 1903

This chart shows a calculation of buying power equivalence for £100 in 1903 (price index tracking began in 1750).

For example, if you started with £100, you would need to end with £100 in order to "adjust" for inflation (sometimes refered to as "beating inflation").

When £100 is equivalent to £100 over time, that means that the "real value" of a single U.K. pound decreases over time. In other words, a pound will pay for fewer items at the store.

This effect explains how inflation erodes the value of a pound over time. By calculating the value in 1903 dollars, the chart below shows how £100 is worth less over 2 years.

According to the Office for National Statistics, each of these GBP amounts below is equal in terms of what it could buy at the time:

This conversion table shows various other 1903 amounts in 1905 pounds, based on the 0.00% change in prices:

How to calculate inflation rate for £100, 1903 to 1905

Our calculations use the following inflation rate formula to calculate the change in value between 1903 and 1905:

Then plug in historical CPI values. The U.K. CPI was 9.3 in the year 1905 and 9.3 in 1903:

£100 in 1905 has the same "purchasing power" or "buying power" as £100 in 1903.

To get the total inflation rate for the 2 years between 1903 and 1905, we use the following formula:

Plugging in the values to this equation, we get:

Data source & citation

Raw data for these calculations comes from the composite price index published by the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS). A composite index is created by combining price data from several different published sources, both official and unofficial. The Consumer Price Index, normally used to compute inflation, has only been tracked since 1988. All inflation calculations after 1988 use the Office for National Statistics' Consumer Price Index, except for the current year, which is based on The Bank of England's forecast.

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