Your working life
Prices measured in hours of your work. Same house, same average job — the only thing that changed is the money.
A house, priced in your time
In 1985 a median new US house cost 9,653 hours of work. In 2026 (year to date) it costs 12,546.
Wages rose the whole time. The house rose faster. Hours of average work per median-priced new house (1971–2026; 2026 averaged over the months published so far):
The retirement that never arrives
Saving in cash from 1985
Save 10% of every full-time paycheck — 2,080 hours a year at the average wage — and keep it in cash at zero yield, every complete year through 2025.
Nobody took it. No theft, no bad decision, no laziness. Saving harder in the same currency runs into the same wall — the erosion is in the money, not in the worker.
Method: hours = median new-house sale price ÷ average hourly earnings; savings held as cash at zero yield (deliberately pessimistic — no interest, no investment), summed over complete years through 2025 and valued at the 2025 CPI. The house chart runs to today: the 2026 point is the average of the months published so far (January–September for wages, Q1–Q3 for house prices). Data: FRED MSPUS (median sales price of new houses sold in the US, U.S. Census Bureau & HUD) and FRED AHETPI (average hourly earnings, production and nonsupervisory, total private, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics); CPI-U (FRED CPIAUCSL / BLS), the same index as the unadjusted CPIAUCNS series on the inflation page. Retrieved 2026-10-27. Hours of work are not the whole story: mortgage rates, home size and household structure also changed across these decades. This measures one thing precisely — how many hours of average work a median-priced house costs.
Retrieved 2026-10-27 · Sources & methodology · not financial advice