Live prices are currently unavailable — the exchange feed could not be reached and no recent cached reading is held.

Bitcoin Data GuideBitcoin Reference

Returns & Performance

Bitcoin's returns in constant dollars

A nominal price is what the market paid. A real price is what that money would buy in a fixed base year. This page restates Bitcoin's year-end record in constant dollars, with the deflator, its base year and its vintage documented on every figure.

2010-2025Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-UNominal year-end prices deflated by the CPI-U to the stated base year.

Base year

—

Real prices are stated in this year's dollars

Total real return

—

Loading the record

Real annualised

—

Compound rate after inflation

Nominal and real prices, year by year

The nominal column is the year-end closing price as published. The deflator column is the cumulative factor applied to restate that price in the base year's dollars, expressed as a percentage. The real column is the result. The final column shows how much of the nominal figure is accounted for by the change in the price level rather than by a change in Bitcoin's purchasing power — a small number in the early years, when the deflator is close to one, and a larger one later.

Bitcoin year-end prices restated in constant dollars, with the deflator applied and the difference between nominal and real figures.
YearNominal priceDeflatorReal priceNominal vs real
No records are available for this dataset.

2010-2025Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U

The deflator and its vintage. The consumer price index is used to restate each year-end price in the base year dollars. The index is published monthly and revised, so the figures here carry the vintage stated in the provenance line above. The most recent year in the series is provisional: the deflator for it is not yet final and will be revised, which means the real price shown for that year may move slightly even though the nominal price will not. Earlier years are settled.

Why the distinction matters

Every price quoted in a market is a nominal price. It is the number of currency units exchanged, and it says nothing about what those units could buy. Over a single year the difference is negligible. Over a decade it is not. A price that doubles over ten years while the price level rises by a third has grown in real terms by roughly half, not by double. For an asset whose whole investment case rests on preserving purchasing power, the real figure is the one that answers the question the holder is actually asking.

Bitcoin's real record is still remarkable, and that is worth stating plainly because the adjustment is sometimes presented as though it were a debunking. Deflating the series reduces the headline numbers without changing their direction. The real annualised rate is lower than the nominal one and still very high by the standards of any conventional asset. What the adjustment does is make the comparison fair: a nominal return measured against a nominal return elsewhere is a like-for-like comparison, and a nominal return measured against a real return is not.

There are limits to what a single deflator can do. The consumer price index measures a basket of goods and services that no individual actually buys, and its composition changes over time. It is the standard deflator for this purpose and it is not a perfect measure of the change in the value of money. A reader who wants a different deflator — a producer index, a wage index, a gold price — will get a different real series from the same nominal one. The method is documented here so that the choice is visible rather than hidden.

The yearly returns page publishes the nominal series this table is built from, and the data sources page records the vintage of every series on the site.

Related reading