£1 in 1776 is worth £159.99 in 2018

Buying power of £1 in 1776

This chart shows a calculation of buying power equivalence for £1 in 1776 (price index tracking began in 1750).

For example, if you started with £1, you would need to end with £159.99 in order to "adjust" for inflation (sometimes refered to as "beating inflation").

When £1 is equivalent to £159.99 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 1776 dollars, the chart below shows how £1 is worth less over 242 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:

This conversion table shows various other 1776 amounts in 2018 pounds, based on the 15,898.87% change in prices:

How to calculate inflation rate for £1, 1776 to 2018

Our calculations use the following inflation rate formula to calculate the change in value between 1776 and 2018:

Then plug in historical CPI values. The U.K. CPI was 6.9 in the year 1776 and 1103.9223 in 2018:

£1 in 1776 has the same "purchasing power" or "buying power" as £159.99 in 2018.

To get the total inflation rate for the 242 years between 1776 and 2018, 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 the current year, which is based on The Bank of England's forecast.

» Read more about inflation and investment.