About Harder To Earn

Harder To Earn is an open-data project dedicated to visualizing the erosion of purchasing power over time.

The Mission

We believe that official inflation metrics (CPI) often obscure the reality of the cost of living. By measuring prices against the 'Standard Unit of Labor' (the median hourly wage), we reveal the true cost of assets today compared to previous decades.

Methodology

Our data is sourced from the Federal Reserve (FRED), the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and historical commodity indexes. We normalize all data points to the median US hourly wage for the respective year to calculate 'Time Cost'—the hours of labor required to purchase an item.

Data Coverage

Our comparisons currently cover 1980 through 2024. The binding constraint is the U.S. Census Bureau's Median Household Income (FRED series MEHOINUSA646N), which is released annually — typically each September for the prior year. Since all "hours of labor" calculations depend on income data, the entire site's coverage is gated by this dataset. Other series like CPI and housing prices are available more recently, but without matching income data a fair labor-cost comparison isn't possible.