Inflation is the quietest tax. It doesn't come on a payslip or a statement. It just lowers what your money can do, every month, while the nominal number on your account or your pension slip stays the same. That makes it easy to miss, and easy to underestimate. This calculator places one number against another so the gap is visible.
Two questions, one engine
Your pension. Most pensions index either fully or partly to inflation, but the indexing is often weaker than headline CPI. Public pensions in Germany are adjusted by a formula that includes wage growth and a sustainability factor, which has historically lagged inflation in shock years like 2022. Private pensions and old fixed-rate annuities often don't index at all. Either way, the calculator tells you exactly how much real purchasing power you've lost or held since the date your pension started.
Your savings. A balance sitting in a current account or low-rate savings account loses purchasing power at the rate of inflation. If you got a bit of interest, you might have offset some of it - but rarely all. Toggle “include interest” on, enter your average rate, and the calculator shows the real return after inflation: usually negative for cash savings over the last few years, given the 2022-23 spike.
How to read the result
The three stats below the verdict are the building blocks. Inflation since then is cumulative CPI for your country over the period - sourced from Destatis for Germany, ONS for the UK, BLS for the US, and the national statistics agency for the other six countries. Your nominal change is what your money did in headline numbers. Real terms is the difference, which is the only number that tells you whether your money buys more or less than it did at the start.
For pension users with a hard nominal payment that hasn't moved, the nominal change reads 0% and the real-terms loss equals cumulative inflation. For savings with no interest, the same. The shock value is how much that adds up to in absolute money: a 19% real loss on a €1,500 pension is €285 of buying power gone per month, every month.
What it doesn't do
This is a check, not a forecast. The calculator looks backward at CPI between two dates you specify. It doesn't project future inflation, simulate sequence-of-returns risk for savings, or model the tax treatment of pension income. Those are deeper questions for a financial adviser. The number here is the first honest look: where do you stand right now.
Sources: Destatis (DE), Statistik Austria (AT), BFS (CH), INSEE (FR), INE (ES), ISTAT (IT), ONS (UK), BLS (US), Statistics Canada (CA). Updated quarterly.