Dollars to Ounces
Dollars to Ounces answers a simple question: what is a historical dollar amount worth today? Most inflation calculators answer it with the Consumer Price Index (CPI), a government-maintained basket of consumer goods that begins in 1913 and has been redefined many times since. This tool uses a different yardstick, one that is older than the CPI and older than the United States itself: an ounce of gold.
The CPI is the official yardstick, but it is not a neutral one. Its basket, weights, and formulas have been revised again and again: substitution adjustments, hedonic "quality" corrections, changing treatment of housing. Each revision changed what "inflation" means. Many people conclude the official numbers understate how much the dollar has really weakened, and anyone pricing groceries, rent, or a house against their paycheck has reason to wonder. Gold is the opposite kind of yardstick: crude and volatile, but beyond anyone's power to redefine. For long horizons (a Civil War soldier's wages, a 1920s house price, your grandmother's first salary) the gold lens often tells a strikingly different story. That difference is why this site exists.
For most of US history, gold wasn't just a measure of the dollar. It was the dollar's legal definition. The Coinage Act of 1792 fixed the dollar at $19.75 per troy ounce of gold; the Acts of 1834/1837 moved it to $20.67; the Gold Reserve Act of 1934 set $35. Only in 1971, when the United States ended dollar–gold convertibility, did the price float freely. Gold is therefore one of the very few assets with a continuous, meaningful dollar price across the entire life of the currency, which is what makes a conversion from 1792 to the present possible at all.
The conversion is two steps, with gold as the carrier of value across time:
ounces of gold = historical amount ÷ gold price in the source year today's amount = ounces of gold × current gold price
The ounces-of-gold intermediate is always shown: it is the measurement; the dollars on each end are just its display currency. Historical years use yearly average prices (long-horizon comparison, not precision timing), while "now" uses the latest completed month's average, so the current end stays fresh even when inflation moves quickly. Results are rounded to 3 significant figures; finer digits would be false precision on top of yearly averages.
Every conversion has a hand-typable address you can share:
usd2oz.com/100/1979/now is amount, source year, target
(a year, or now).
Every number in the dataset is traceable to a primary source. Three eras, one principle: gold is priced in the standard daily-use currency of its time. That is why 1862–1878 uses actual greenback-era market prices rather than the suspended $20.67 parity: during those years the paper greenback, not gold coin, was what Americans earned and spent. (Confederate dollars are out of scope.)
US statutory mint price of gold, USD per troy ounce
Source: US coinage statutes: Coinage Act of 1792 ($19.75), Coinage Acts of 1834/1837 ($20.67), Gold Reserve Act of 1934 ($35.00). License: Public domain (US federal statutes).
Fixed legal definitions of the dollar in gold; no market average exists for these years. 1879 resumes at $20.67 after specie payments resumed (Resumption Act).
Yearly average price of gold in greenbacks (the era's daily-use currency), USD per troy ounce
Source: Wesley C. Mitchell, Gold, Prices and Wages Under the Greenback Standard (Univ. of California Press, 1908), Table 1, p. 4, 'Average' column. License: Public domain (published 1908). Retrieved 2026-07-09.
$20.67 parity × Mitchell's yearly average currency price of $100 gold ÷ 100. Digits verified identical across two independent archive.org scans; cross-checked against MeasuringWorth's New York market price series (Officer & Williamson), agreement within $0.01/oz for all 17 years.
Yearly average free-market gold price, USD per troy ounce
Source: World Bank Commodity Price Data (the Pink Sheet), monthly series. License: CC BY 4.0 (World Bank). Retrieved 2026-07-09.
Arithmetic mean of the twelve monthly Pink Sheet values per calendar year; every year 1968–2025 verified to have exactly 12 monthly observations.
Latest monthly average, compiled in from current-price.json
Source: World Bank Commodity Price Data (the Pink Sheet), monthly series. License: CC BY 4.0 (World Bank). Retrieved 2026-07-09.
The month's Pink Sheet average, committed to current-price.json by the monthly updater and compiled into each build. No runtime fetch and no fallback: a build without a valid current price fails.
This site is informational and educational only. It is not financial, investment, or tax advice. Gold's market price is volatile, so present-day results move month to month; any single conversion is an approximation, not an appraisal. Results here will often differ, sometimes wildly, from CPI-based inflation calculators. Which yardstick better reflects reality is exactly the question this site invites you to ask.