Today
$100,000
Your salary's sticker value right now.
THE PRICED-IN-HOURS LENS
It Used to Cost 4 Hours.
Now It Costs 22.
Dollars age badly. Hours don't. We re-priced seven pieces of the life you're building — in hours of average-wage work, 1985 to today.
THE GAP, IN MULTIPLIERS 1993 → 2026
Official inflation says 2.3×. The labor cost of this thing says 5.5×. That gap is the story.
CPI—
Wages (BLS AHETPI)—
SPY price—
Hours to buy one SPY share—
Hours of work to acquire one unit
Last 30 years, shown as raw hours rather than an index.
Childcare and health premium data lazy-load when toggled. Annual series render as step functions.
That is not a stock tip. It's arithmetic: price ÷ wage = hours.
The chart above does not say whether broad-market exposure, a home, college, childcare, or any other thing is wise, cheap, expensive, early, or late to buy. It says how many hours of average-wage work each currently costs versus how many it once cost. What to do with that information is a conversation for you and a fiduciary advisor.
Why hours make the gap visible.
Forty-four of whose dollars?
Dollar figures age badly. The $44 share and the $718 share don't tell you much until you ask: forty-four of whose dollars? A dollar is a measuring stick that keeps changing length. An hour is less elegant, but more honest.
See the multipliers above the chart.
Every piece of the life you want has its own curve
College, childcare, housing, health premiums, gas, food, and broad-market exposure do not move together. CPI averages the weather. Your future is a route through it. The point of this page is to show the route in a unit you can feel.
Why hours
Hours are pre-math. You know what twenty hours means before anyone explains discount rates. You know what 3,800 hours means before a spreadsheet turns it into a milestone.
In 2015, saving the down payment on a typical US home — set at 10%, the level first-time buyers actually put down — required about 27 months of average-wage work, banking a fifth of each paycheck. By 2025 the same arithmetic ran closer to 34 months. The house didn't change. The labor cost of reaching it did.
What this has to do with Aspire Rate
The chart is history. Aspire Rate is the forward-looking measurement: the growth rate your listed resources would need to clear, at these assumptions, to keep up with the life you're pricing.
Aspire shows you the shape of your gap at your current assumptions. It does not recommend specific assets, allocations, or actions. Talk to a fiduciary advisor before acting on anything you see here.
WAGE BENCHMARK
Re-price the chart in your wage.
Change the denominator. The multipliers above stay anchored to AHETPI; the chart, stats, and cards below re-price in your selected wage.
$
Your wage is not a forecast. Wage data current as of 2026-05-27. All outputs are at these assumptions.
SALARY TIME MACHINE
The raise that wasn't a raise.
Enter what you earn. We'll show you what it would have bought in 1995, 2005, and 2015.
2015 dollars
$73,612
—
2005 dollars
$60,649
—
1995 dollars
$47,329
—
Your $100,000 today has the buying power of $73,612 in 2015.
CPI-U All Items, annual averages. Source: BLS via FRED series CPIAUCSL.
TIME COST EXPLORER
What else costs more of your life now?
STEALTH INFLATION
The price stayed the same. The box got smaller.
Eight grocery staples, tracked. Package sizes shrank while sticker prices held flat — the inflation CPI misses.
Everything on this page costs more hours than it used to. The question is whether your pay kept up.
Aspire Rate is the growth rate your listed resources would need, at these assumptions, to keep up with the life you're pricing. Calculate yours in under two minutes.
Methodology and sources
Formula
hours_t = nominal_price_t / wage_t
Each series is priced in hours by dividing its nominal price by the wage benchmark for the same month. Default benchmark: BLS AHETPI (CES0500000008), monthly, nominal, before tax.
Caveats
- AHETPI is a national average for a specific worker class. It is not median household income.
- Annual sources are carried forward to monthly slots for chart alignment and rendered as step functions.
- Childcare and health-premium series start in 2003 and 1999 respectively; pre-window observations are greyed out.
- SPY series begins 1993-01. SPY labels and tooltips are hours-only.
- The home down-payment series uses Zillow ZHVI national all-homes middle-tier smoothed seasonally adjusted values multiplied by 10%. A conventional 20% down would roughly double the labor-hours result.
- Big Mac is a measurement control, not an investment alternative.
- This is an educational measurement, not advice.
Source IDs
AHETPI, CPIAUCSL, Yahoo:SPY, Zillow:ZHVI_AllHomes_Mid_SSA, CollegeBoard:Trends, Genworth:CostOfCare, KFF:EHBS, EIA:GASREGW, BLS+Economist:BigMac, NAR:2025_Profile_HomeBuyersSellers.
Data Stamp
Data current as of loading.
FAQ
Why hours, not dollars?
Because dollar figures age badly. A $44 share in 1993 and a $718 share in 2026 don't tell you much until you ask whose dollars. Hours are a unit almost everyone earns and almost everyone spends — pre-math, felt before they're calculated.
Why AHETPI, not median household income?
Median household income is annual and only updated yearly. AHETPI is the BLS's monthly production-and-nonsupervisory wage series — a continuous, monthly benchmark that goes back to 1964. It's a specific worker class.
Why is the Big Mac the control?
Because if the chart were just measuring inflation, every line would rise together. The Big Mac is a labor-priced everyday good that has stayed roughly flat in hours since the mid-1980s.