About What Did It Cost Back Then?
What it is
"When Was It How Much?" (그때는 얼마였을까?) shows everyday prices in Seoul from 1963 to 2026, year by year, like a shop's price board. It covers 24 series: jajangmyeon (black bean noodles), city bus, subway, taxi, movie tickets, rice, milk, eggs, coal briquettes (yeontan, used for home heating), cigarettes, books, gasoline, the TV license fee, payphone calls, electricity and city gas, plus seven eating-out prices (kimbap, naengmyeon cold noodles, kalguksu noodle soup, bibimbap, kimchi jjigae set meal, samgyetang chicken soup and samgyeopsal pork belly). Put next to the minimum wage, each price also tells you how many minutes of work it was worth. All amounts are in Korean won (₩).
How to use it
- On the Items tab on the left, pick an item. You see its trend from the first record to today, how many times higher it is, whether it rose faster than consumer prices, and how many minutes of minimum-wage work it equals. You can overlay other items on the chart.
- On the Years tab, pick a year to see that year's price board and how much each item you could buy with a given amount of money. Press Play to step through the years.
- The Tools tab has: price in hours worked, items that rose faster than inflation, two years side by side, prices over my life, and data and sources.
- The address keeps the screen you are looking at (for example /price#/item/jajang), so you can share it as is.
Data and method
- Values before 2010 come mainly from the original tables of the Seoul Institute's "50 Years of Seoul Living Prices" (『서울 생활물가 50년』).
- Recent values were checked against KAMIS (agricultural prices), the livestock distribution information service Dabom, the Korea Consumer Agency's Chamgagyeok price survey, the Korean Film Council's annual review, the Korean Publishers Association's statistics, Opinet (fuel prices) and Seoul city fare notices. For the eight eating-out items, values from 2014 are Seoul annual averages (provisional) from Chamgagyeok. The minimum wage is the figure announced by the Minimum Wage Commission. Every record links to its source.
- Years with no record are not filled in. For fares recorded as a history of adjustments (bus, subway, taxi, TV license fee, payphone), the fare is taken to apply until the next adjustment and is labeled "adjusted fare". For other items, only a record from up to 2 years earlier is shown, in gray, with its year.
- Items whose specification changed (rice moving from a 40 kg sack to a 20 kg bag, bottled milk to 1 L cartons) are split into separate series, and no multiple is calculated between them.
- Consumer price inflation uses Statistics Korea's annual figures (1975 to 2025).
Limits and caveats
Everything is in nominal won. Annual averages, single-month values and adjusted fares are mixed, so each record states its basis. The 2026 values are year-to-date averages or recent monthly values and may change before the year ends. The ratio between an old price and today's price does not by itself describe living standards or how prices felt at the time.
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