Find out what your money will really be worth in the future, or how much you'd have needed in the past to match today's purchasing power.
Choose what you want to find out, then enter your amount, rate, and time period.
Future Value: what today's amount will feel like it's worth, N years from now.
This shows how much purchasing power ₹100000 will lose over 10 years at 6% average inflation.
Enter your details and hit calculate
Calculate to see the year-by-year erosion (or growth) of your money's value.
Inflation is the rate at which prices rise over time, which means the same rupee amount buys progressively less each year. This calculator lets you look at that effect from either direction: Future Value tells you what a sum of money today will "feel like" in the future — how much you'd need then to buy what it buys now. Past Value works backward — it tells you what a rupee amount today was equivalent to some years ago, or what you'd have needed years ago to have the same purchasing power as an amount today.
The math is straightforward compounding, just like interest, except it works in the opposite direction for your money's real value. For Future Value, the calculator multiplies your amount by (1 + inflation rate)^years. For Past Value, it divides your amount by that same factor. A higher inflation rate or a longer time period both magnify the effect, since compounding means small yearly increases add up to a large cumulative difference.
Worked example (Future Value): Suppose you have ₹1,00,000 today and expect average inflation of 6% per year. In 10 years, you'd need ₹1,00,000 × (1.06)^10 ≈ ₹1,79,085 to have the same purchasing power your ₹1,00,000 has today. In other words, your ₹1,00,000 today will feel like only about ₹55,839 in today's terms after 10 years of 6% inflation.
Worked example (Past Value): Suppose something costs ₹1,00,000 today, and inflation has averaged 6% per year over the last 10 years. Working backward, ₹1,00,000 ÷ (1.06)^10 ≈ ₹55,839 — meaning the same item would have cost roughly ₹55,839 ten years ago.
Keep in mind that inflation isn't perfectly uniform — the rate varies year to year and differs across categories like food, fuel, healthcare, and education. This calculator uses a single assumed average rate applied consistently across the whole period, which is a reasonable planning approximation but won't exactly match any specific real-world price history. For long-term financial planning — retirement corpus targets, education costs, or comparing salary growth to inflation — this kind of average-rate projection is the standard approach used by most financial planners in India.
This calculator is for educational and planning purposes only and does not represent official inflation data. For official inflation figures, refer to the Consumer Price Index (CPI) published by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI), Government of India.
Future Value tells you what an amount today will be equivalent to N years from now, given an inflation rate — useful for retirement or goal planning. Past Value works backward: it tells you what an amount today was equivalent to N years ago, useful for understanding how much prices have already risen.
India's long-term average retail inflation (CPI) has typically been in the 5–7% range, though it varies year to year. For general planning, 6% is a commonly used assumption, but you should adjust this based on the specific category you're planning for — education and healthcare inflation, for instance, often run higher than general CPI.
No — it applies a single constant rate uniformly across the whole period you enter. Real-world inflation fluctuates year to year, so this is a planning approximation rather than a precise historical reconstruction. For precise historical figures, refer to the official CPI data published by MoSPI.
Use Future Value to see what your current monthly expenses will look like decades from now, so you can set a realistic retirement corpus target. Many people underestimate retirement needs by planning around today's costs instead of the inflated cost they'll actually face in the future.
