Enter what you earned in any month since 1998. The calculator shows how much your pay needed to rise to keep up with the Reality Index — the prices households actually pay — and sets it beside the official CPI on exactly the same months, so the two can be compared.
The Reality Index is a fixed-basket index of ten categories of everyday household spending (a fixed 2000 basket, Laspeyres, 1980 = 100), priced monthly from January 1998 and not seasonally adjusted. The calculator divides the index level in the later month by the level in the earlier month; the same arithmetic is run on the official CPI-U (all items, not seasonally adjusted), so the CPI figure here reproduces the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ own inflation calculator to the dollar. “Your pay needed to rise” is that ratio applied to the pay you enter; if you enter your pay today, the verdict compares the rise you actually got with the rise prices required. Both series are on the monthly index page and in the raw data. The index does not measure your personal basket — it measures what the typical household pays — and it says nothing about taxes, which take their own share.
The series begins in 1998; earlier dates will be added from the annual series. The latest month is the most recent CPI release.