Salary vs inflation tracker
Did your pay rise keep up with the cost of living?
How to use this tool
Why your salary might feel like it's shrinking
A pay rise feels good — but what matters is whether it outpaces inflation. If you got a 15% raise over 5 years but inflation was 22%, your real salary fell by 7%. You take home more numbers, but those numbers buy less. This is called a real wage decline — and it has been widespread since the 2022 inflation shock.
In the US, real wages declined in 2021–2022 even as nominal wages rose, because inflation (8%) outpaced wage growth (~5%). Workers in Turkey, Pakistan, and Argentina faced even steeper real wage losses as inflation raced into double and triple digits. To break even, Pakistani workers needed salary increases of over 68% over just 5 years (2021–2026) just to maintain the same standard of living.
Methodology
This tool compares your nominal salary growth against the cumulative compounded inflation for your selected country and period, to reveal whether your real (inflation-adjusted) purchasing power actually increased.
Salary grew from $50,000 to $56,000 over 5 years (+12% nominal), while cumulative inflation over that period was 14.8%:
Real change = 12% − 14.8% = −2.8% — despite the raise, real purchasing power fell.
Cumulative inflation is compounded from the same annual CPI series used across this site. Sources: Data Sources.