Buying power of £100 in 1775

This chart shows a calculation of buying power equivalence for £100 in 1775 (price index tracking began in 1750).

For example, if you started with £100, you would need to end with £9,930 in order to "adjust" for inflation (sometimes refered to as "beating inflation").

When £100 is equivalent to £9,930 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 1775 dollars, the chart below shows how £100 buys less over the past 227 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:

How to Calculate Inflation Rate for £100, 1775 to 2002

This inflation calculator uses the following inflation rate formula:

Then plug in historical CPI values. The U.K. CPI was 7 in the year 1775 and 695.1 in 2002:

£100 in 1775 has the same "purchasing power" or "buying power" as £9,930 in 2002.

To get the total inflation rate for the 227 years between 1775 and 2002, 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 2017, which is based on The Bank of England's forecast.

» Read more about inflation and investment.