South Africa Inflation Calculator

Buying power of R10.95 in 1978

This chart shows a calculation of buying power equivalence for R10.95 in 1978 (price index tracking began in 1957).

For example, if you started with R10.95, you would need to end with R448.57 in order to "adjust" for inflation (sometimes refered to as "beating inflation").

When R10.95 is equivalent to R448.57 over time, that means that the "real value" of a single South African rand decreases over time. In other words, a rand will pay for fewer items at the store.

This effect explains how inflation erodes the value of a rand over time. By calculating the value in 1978 dollars, the chart below shows how R10.95 is worth less over 46 years.

According to the OECD and the World Bank, each of these ZAR amounts below is equal in terms of what it could buy at the time:

This conversion table shows various other 1978 amounts in today's rand, based on the 3,996.54% change in prices:

How to calculate inflation rate for R10.95 since 1978

Our calculations use the following inflation rate formula to calculate the change in value between 1978 and today:

Then plug in historical CPI values. The South African CPI was 3.863215 in the year 1978 and 158.25803574504084 in 2024:

R10.95 in 1978 has the same "purchasing power" or "buying power" as R448.57 in 2024.

To get the total inflation rate for the 46 years between 1978 and 2024, we use the following formula:

Plugging in the values to this equation, we get:

Data source & citation

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