About the numbers

Methodology & Data Sources

Real Millionaire asks a simple question: how much money would you need today to have the same purchasing power as $1 million in 1795, when the word ‘millionaire’ first became popular?

The short version

We start with $1,000,000 in 1795 and adjust it for more than two centuries of US consumer price inflation. The result is today’s Real Millionaire threshold: currently about $26,735,979.

Step 1 — 1795 to 1913: historical estimates

Official US consumer price statistics only begin in 1913. For earlier years we use reconstructed historical consumer-price estimates published by MeasuringWorth. Comparing the 1795 and 1913 price levels gives a single historical multiplier.

Current historical 1795→1913 multiplier: 0.7888249795

This value is stored in our settings and read from there, so any verified correction is applied automatically everywhere on the site.

Step 2 — 1913 onward: official BLS CPI

From 1913 we use the official Consumer Price Index published by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Series CUUR0000SA0
CPI-U, All Items, U.S. City Average, Not Seasonally Adjusted
1913 reference: the average of the twelve monthly 1913 values (9.8833)
Latest official CPI used: 334.98 (August 2026)

The formula

Real Millionaire = $1,000,000 × historical 1795→1913 multiplier × (latest CPI ÷ 1913 CPI average)

Why the number keeps ticking

The BLS publishes CPI once a month. Between releases, the large number on our homepage grows smoothly using the latest 12-month inflation rate (currently 3.4%). That continuously ticking figure is therefore an estimate; it is reset to the official calculation each time a new CPI value is published.

12-month inflation = latest CPI ÷ CPI twelve months earlier − 1

The Real Millionaire Factor

For each person in our rankings we show how many Real Millionaires their fortune represents:

Real Millionaire Factor = Person’s net worth ÷ Current Real Millionaire threshold

The factor is calculated live from the current threshold and rounded to the nearest whole number.

Other data sources

Billionaire ranking — estimated net worth and rank from a Forbes-derived real-time billionaires dataset accessed through RapidAPI, refreshed daily. The original ranking is maintained by Forbes.
Wikipedia links and portraits — matched via Wikidata; portraits come from Wikimedia Commons under their stated reusable licences. Links and images are shown only when a match is verified.
News — headlines discovered through Google News RSS search. We show the headline, publisher and date and link to the original article; we do not copy article text or images.

All figures are estimates. See our Disclaimer for important limitations.