What your old rupees are worth today.

An amount, the year it's from, and the year you want it in. We use the official all-India Consumer Price Index (Combined), averaged over each financial year, April to March. The maths runs on this page and nothing is sent anywhere.

Our calculation. Value = amount × CPI in the later year ÷ CPI in the earlier year. Each financial year uses the average of its 12 monthly indices. Older years on base 2012 are moved to base 2024 with MoSPI's own linking factor, 0.5267. The average a year counts from the middle of one period to the middle of the other.

An inflation calculator is one division. MoSPI prices a fixed basket of what Indian households buy, from rice and rent to phone plans and school fees, every month in 1,465 villages and over 1,400 urban markets. The index says what that basket costs against a base year. If the index is 65.7 in one year and 109.5 in another, the basket costs 1.67 times as much. So does your ₹1 lakh.

The twist in 2026: MoSPI rebuilt the index. From the January 2026 figures it uses base 2024, a new basket from the 2023-24 household spending survey, and food's weight drops from 45.86% to 36.75%. The old series, base 2012, stopped in December 2025. Both ran side by side through 2025, and MoSPI published one number to join them: 0.5267. Multiply an old index by it and you're on the new base. We do exactly that, nothing of our own.

Why financial years? RBI's Handbook publishes the yearly averages that way, and it's how your salary, your tax and your Form 16 count. A single month swings with onion prices. A 12-month average doesn't.

One thing the index can't do: it's an average household, not yours. If your rupees go mostly to school fees or rent in a metro, your own inflation can run hotter.

₹1,00,000 in 2015-16. The CPI averaged 124.7 that year on base 2012, which is 65.68 on base 2024 (124.7 × 0.5267). September 2026 is 109.49.

So a ₹1 lakh salary in 2015-16 needed to be about ₹1.67 lakh by September 2026 just to buy the same things. A raise to ₹1.5 lakh sounds like 50%. It's a pay cut in a party hat.

Illustrative, our calculation on official index numbers. Past inflation, not a forecast.

Every index on this page, with the official place we read it and the date it was published.

• Years from 2011-12 only. That's where the all-India CPI (Combined) starts. Older indices exist for narrower groups, such as industrial workers, and we don't splice them in.
• Financial years, not calendar years, and a year's average, not a single month. The "today" figure is one month, the latest MoSPI has released, and it's provisional until the next release.
• Each year's average is RBI's published figure, rounded to one decimal. That moves a result by up to about 0.1%, and a year's inflation by up to 0.1 point against RBI's own.
• Across the 2026 base change we use MoSPI's linking factor. That joins the two series at the overall index only, which is all we use. The two baskets differ, so treat 2025-26 against older years as a close estimate.
• It's the average Indian household's basket. Your own costs, like rent in a big city, school fees or medicines, can rise faster or slower.
• Not the cost inflation index for capital gains tax. That's a separate CBDT number with its own rules.
• Past inflation only. The average yearly rate is history, not a forecast or a target for anything.

Tested against hand-worked cases, MoSPI's linking factor rebuilt from the monthly indices, and RBI's own yearly CPI inflation for 2012-13 to 2024-25: 39 checks. v1.0, 30 October 2026.