Real minimum wage calculator

Input contract, optional base-year statute, and validation rules

Every wage and every CPI must be strictly greater than zero: a zero or negative price index would make the real wage undefined or meaningless, and a non-positive statutory wage is rejected for the same classroom domain. Omit the optional base wage and those four comparison keys are omitted, never null. POST a JSON body with three required finite numbers: nominal_wage (the statutory or posted floor in the wage year), cpi (the consumer price index in that same year), and cpi_base (the consumer price index in the year whose prices you want the wage expressed in). Optionally send base_nominal_wage as the statute that was posted in the base year—same currency and pay period as nominal_wage—and decimals as an integer from zero through twelve (default six) to control half-up rounding on every computed field. Missing fields, empty strings, non-finite values, and non-integer decimals outside the allowed range fail with invalid_input and are not billed. Common aliases are accepted: wage, minimum_wage, nominal, or hourly_wage for nominal_wage; cpi_current, price_index, or cpi_wage for cpi; base_cpi, cpi_reference, or reference_cpi for cpi_base; base_wage or reference_wage for base_nominal_wage. On success the body returns the echoed inputs (rounded), inflation_factor as cpi over cpi_base, price_ratio as cpi_base over cpi, real_wage as nominal times that ratio, purchasing_power_index as one hundred times the ratio, purchasing_power_change_percent as the percent gap between the real and face-value wage, purchasing_power_band as eroded, unchanged, or increased, and formula. When base_nominal_wage is present the body also includes that older statute, real_change_amount, real_change_percent versus the older statute, and real_wage_band as real_gain, real_unchanged, or real_loss. Example: nominal ten, cpi one hundred twenty, and cpi_base one hundred yields real_wage eight and one third and purchasing_power_band eroded. Add base_nominal_wage eight and the statute still shows a real gain even though prices rose.

Where a real minimum wage API earns its keep

Labor-economics and public-finance courses use a real minimum wage calculator so students can convert any valid statutory floor and CPI pair into constant-price purchasing power without borrowing a compound inflation rate they were never given and without confusing the identity with a GDP deflator or an hourly-to-salary converter. Exam generators and LMS plugins need a deterministic oracle that rejects zero or negative indexes instead of inventing a hollow real wage that a buggy grader might treat as unchanged. Failed validation does not consume balance. Teaching dashboards and notebooks often rebuild long statutory histories from published wage orders and a national CPI; pinning the arithmetic in a tiny parse API keeps spreadsheet drift out of the real-wage column and makes the optional real-gain band checkable in continuous integration. Keep requests small, pin the rounded real_wage and, when you send a base-year statute, real_change_percent in tests, and you get reproducible constant-price floors for homework, LMS plugins, and edge workers without standing up a full CPI vintage pipeline of your own.