trynkit
novelty toys

What did things cost
the year you were born?

Gas, milk, a movie ticket, a home — see the prices back then, and how many times more they cost now.

How it works

Type the year you were born. The tool shows you roughly what everyday things cost around then in the United States, alongside their price today and how many times more expensive they've become. Everything runs in your browser — nothing you enter is stored or sent anywhere.

About the numbers

Where these prices come from

They're compiled from public United States data, not invented: the Bureau of Labor Statistics (CPI and Average Price Data), FRED at the St. Louis Fed, the U.S. Census and ACS for median home value, USPS historical postage rates, and published industry averages for the two items nobody publishes a clean series for — cinema tickets and new cars.

Everything is rounded. These are benchmarks meant to be recognisable, not accounting figures.

Why the card may show a different year than the one you typed

We store benchmark years a decade apart — 1930 through 2020, plus 2025. Your birth year is probably not one of them, so the card snaps to the closest one we have and tells you which year it is showing. Type 1987 and you get 1990, labelled 1990.

It used to invent the years in between. The tool drew a straight line between the two nearest benchmarks and printed the result under your birth year, labelled an approximation. That sounds reasonable and it was wrong: 1987 petrol came out at $1.17 against an actual $0.90, and 2012 at $2.67 against an actual $3.64 — too high by roughly 30% in 1987, and too low by 27% in 2012. A straight line has no room for the 1986 oil crash or the 2008 spike, so it erased both. Worse, minimum wage and postage are set by law and move in steps, so interpolating them produced a minimum wage that had never legally existed.

So every number on your card is a figure that was actually recorded in an actual year, and the year printed above it is the year it belongs to. The cost is that a 1987 birth shows 1990. We would rather hand you a real 1990 than an invented 1987.

Where a benchmark itself has no figure we show nothing rather than reach for a neighbour. That's why some items are blank for some years. There was no U.S. federal minimum wage before 1938, and no reliable median-home series before 1940. A blank space is us saying "we don't know", and we'll take that over a confident wrong number every time.

"×N today" is not inflation — this matters

The multiplier on your card compares raw dollars: what a loaf of bread cost then, against what it costs now. It is not inflation-adjusted, and it is not telling you that bread got more expensive in any meaningful sense.

Here's the trap. A 1970 petrol price looks impossibly cheap next to today's — but a 1970 hourly wage looks equally small next to today's, and the tool doesn't show you that side. Prices rose; so did what people were paid. Comparing only one of the two is how you end up believing something false about the past.

So read the card as nostalgia, not economics. That's also why we stick to everyday objects rather than trying to answer "was life cheaper back then" — that's a real and interesting question, and these numbers genuinely cannot answer it.

These are American prices

The whole dataset is U.S. — the sources above are U.S. agencies. If you were born somewhere else, the shape of the result still rings true (yes, things had smaller numbers on them), but the specific figures are not your country's, and we're not going to pretend otherwise by silently converting them.

Why these nine items

Each one had to clear two bars: a long, continuous public record going back decades, and instant recognisability. A gallon of milk and a postage stamp qualify — people have been buying both, unchanged, forever, and somebody official has been writing the price down the whole time.

Cinema tickets and new cars are the awkward pair. There's no clean official series for either, so those two are published industry averages rather than government figures — which is exactly why we name the sources rather than presenting all nine as though they came from the same place.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need an account?
No. Type a year, get the card. No sign-up, no limits.
Is my birth year stored?
No. Everything runs in your browser and the year you enter is not uploaded or saved.
Why are some items blank for my year?
Because we don't have a figure we trust for that year. There was no federal minimum wage before 1938 and no reliable median-home series before 1940, so we leave the space empty rather than guess.
Are the prices exact?
They are real, rounded figures from public data — but they are benchmark years, roughly one per decade, and we do not invent the years in between. If you were born in 1987 the card snaps to 1990 and shows you what 1990 actually cost, labelled with that year. We used to average the two nearest benchmarks instead, which produced prices that had never existed and were out by as much as 30%. Snapping is less flattering and more honest.
Does '×N today' account for inflation?
No, and this is the one thing worth understanding. It compares raw dollars only. Wages rose alongside prices, so a big multiplier does not by itself mean something became less affordable.
Are these prices for my country?
They're United States figures, from U.S. public data sources. We don't convert them, because a converted number would look precise while meaning very little.