“What is £x worth today?”

It’s something all family historians ask at some point. Usually when they have found the will of an ancestor. It’s only natural to wonder how comfortably off (or not) they were.

Well, the go-to source to calculate a comparison is the Bank of England’s Inflation Calculator.

Which you can find here:

But there are huge caveats to the results

‘Household furniture etc at time of his death’

In 1833, the inventory for Thomas Pattinson, of Westfield House, ‘in the parish of Bowness, in the county of Cumberland’ came to a total of: 

£12 9 shillings and 6 pence.

According to the Bank of England’s inflation calculator, in 2025, that (rounded up to £13) is worth:

£1,340.62.

Doesn’t make Thomas Pattinson (a yeoman farmer) sound exactly wealthy, does it?

However

But read the small print on the Bank of England’s Inflation Calculator site.

‘Over long periods, the definitions of goods and services included in the price index have changed. For example, a family’s food and clothes today are very different to those of a typical family a hundred years ago…

‘Overall, these features of the data mean that comparisons of prices further back in time and over long periods are less accurate than comparisons over short periods in recent years.’

For me, it’s the later paragraph that’s key when working out what old sums are worth today.

Let’s go back to Thomas Pattinson of Westfield House to see why.

Thomas Pattinson’s ‘goods and chattels’

Firstly, it’s important to note that inventories only ever listed the items the appraisers bothered to list. In Thomas Pattinson’s case, there is no mention of livestock or farming gear, or crops – for some reason, it’s only household items.

The inventory has 17 lines, ranging in value from ‘china: 2s 6d,’ to ‘wearing apparel: £2’.

The Bank of England’s inflation calculator only works in whole pounds, so let’s start with items that are easy to calculate.

For instance:

Dining table: 10s

Round oak table: 10s.

Added together, that’s two tables for 20s. And there were 20s in £1.

So, that’s two tables for what the Bank of England’s inflation calculator says would be £103 today.

Good luck getting a dining table and a round oak table for £103!

I did manage to find a (very small!) dining table for £189 online. But only because it was reduced in a sale from £279. And while it claimed to be a four-seater, you’d struggle to have even four breakfast cereal bowls and coffee cups on it at the same time.

I suspect they had something bigger in the farmhouse! And the inventory does include ‘half dozen chairs’ (at 12 shillings)

Cheapest oak side table on the same site was £169 (from £249).

There was also a ‘round table’ valued at 2s 6d. So you could have bought eight of those for £1. So eight round tables for £103 today. 

Doesn’t work, does it?

Clothing (worth today)

Thomas Pattinson’s ‘wearing apparel’ came to £2.

So, by the Bank of England’s inflation calculator, his entire wardrobe was worth today the equivalent of £206.

Now, as the site says:

‘a family’s food and clothes today are very different to those of a typical family a hundred years ago’.

But even if he only had two work shirts, two pairs of work trouser, one work coat, one pair of work boots, and a ‘Sunday best’ suit and shoes… well, do the maths!

Even shopping conservatively today, I’d say the £13 of goods in the inventory of Thomas Pattinson would be worth today more like £8,500 than the Bank of England’s £1,340.

Average income

To understand what £x is worth today, it helps to know what people were earning ‘in those days’.

I have a note from ‘British incomes circa 1800’

My note says:

‘average annual household incomes varied between from around £30 among labourers and the poor to £8,000 among the peerage. Less than one percent of households had incomes of £1,000 or more while a little more than 6 percent of households had average annual incomes of £200 or more.’

It doesn’t look like incomes had changed greatly by 1833.

So that would mean Thomas Pattinson’s £13 of ‘goods and chattels’ would have cost between a third and half a year’s wages for a labourer.

The National Minimum Wage (35-hour week, adults) in 2025 is worth £22,222. 

Divide that by a third and it comes to £7,407 (and 33p recurring!). By two, and it’s £11,111.

So, Thomas Pattinson’s goods, worked out this way, were somewhere between £7,4k and £11.1k.

Which makes my £8,500 calculation above seem reasonable.

The rest of the inventory

The second page covers cash in the house (£5), more household furniture (£12 9s 6d), rent due from Easton estate (£7 15s) and rent due from Westfield estate (£15 10s).

Total: £40 14s 6s.

Or £4,125.30, on the Bank of England’s inflation calculator.

It’s impossible to work that out (how much land was he renting out?) 

The £5 cash is calculated as £515.66 today. But if you could buy ten dining tables for a fiver…

Look on Thomas’ £5 cash as being one sixth of a labourer’s wages, and it’s more like £3,700 in today’s values. 

You could buy ten small dining tables for that. Should you wish to.

Conclusion

The point to all this is not to take simple calculations of ‘what is £x worth today?’ too literally.

If you have the inventory of an ancestor, or any other record relating to money, and what to know (effectively) ‘how well off were they?’ then think wider than a simple calculation.

Find out what the average wage was at that time. Think what it is today. Think what prices are today for clothing and furniture. Do the maths. 

And you’ll have a much fairer idea of what they were worth today.

But in the case of an inventory, that still only tells you a small part of the picture

Footnote

Shortly after writing the above, I spotted a reference to:

‘Agreement between William Rawlinson and Reginald Gregg for rebuilding of Graythwaite Hall for £27’.

This was in 1719.

The Bank of England puts the value as £5,273 today.

MeasuringWorth ranges it from £5,004 to £886,800.

With ‘labour cost’ between the two, at £75,000.

Depends how big a rebuild it was, I guess!