3 New Ways to Use the Inflation Calculator

The Inflation Calculator already let you look up what a past dollar amount is worth today using official BLS CPI-U data, or project a future value under an assumed inflation rate. Three additions extend that same math to a couple of situations people kept asking about: comparing a raise to inflation, working backward from a recent figure, and getting the trend chart out of the browser as an image. None of these change the underlying CPI-U data or formulas — they reframe and extend the tools already built around them.

1. Salary / Wage mode: is your raise keeping up with inflation?

Salary / Wage mode takes four inputs: your old salary, your new salary, and the year each one applied to. It then runs the same value-over-time math the calculator already uses — converting the old salary into the new salary's year using the CPI-U index — to answer the question a raw percentage increase can't answer on its own: did your take-home pay actually grow, or did it just keep pace with (or fall behind) rising prices?

The result splits your raise into two numbers: the nominal raise, which is the plain percentage difference between old and new pay, and the real (inflation-adjusted) raise, which compares your new salary against what your old salary would need to be, in the new year's dollars, just to have the same purchasing power. If your nominal raise is smaller than the CPI-U-implied raise, your real raise is negative — meaning the new number on your paycheck buys less than the old one did, even though it's a bigger number.

2. Backward custom-rate projection: deflate a recent amount

The calculator's existing Future value mode projects a present-day amount forward using a compound rate you pick yourself — for example, "what will $1,000 be worth in 10 years at an assumed 3% annual inflation?" The new backward projection mode answers the mirror-image question: given a recent amount, what would an equivalent amount have looked like a set number of years earlier, under that same kind of assumed rate?

This is deliberately different from the "Value over time" mode, which uses actual historical CPI-U index numbers for real years. Backward custom-rate projection is a hypothetical modeling tool: you supply the rate, so it's useful for stress-testing "what if inflation had averaged X% instead" scenarios, or for a rough backward estimate when you want to pick your own assumption rather than look up the real historical index. For an answer grounded in actual CPI-U history, the Value over time tab (which also works in reverse by simply swapping the start and end years) remains the more precise option.

3. Export the trend chart as a PNG

When you run a calculation in the Value over time tab, a trend chart already appears beneath the result, plotting either the CPI-U index or the equivalent dollar value across your chosen date range. Previously, getting that chart out of the page meant a screenshot or the browser's Print-to-PDF option. The new "Save chart PNG" button generates the image directly in the browser, using the standard canvas toDataURL method to convert the chart into a downloadable PNG file — no upload, no server round-trip, and no account required.

This is handy if you're putting together a presentation, a blog post, a forum reply, or a personal budgeting note and want the visual on its own rather than the whole page. Since the export happens locally in your browser, the image reflects exactly whatever series (CPI-U index or dollar value) and date range you had selected at the time.