Your nan wasn't wrong. Money really did feel different once. The question is — was it actually worth more, or does every generation just think the old days were better? Spoiler: it's a bit of both, and the maths is more interesting than you'd think.
Let's start with the obvious
No, £310 a year wasn't poverty. But it wasn't far off.
Cast your mind back to the 1950s. The average British worker earned about £310 a year. Sounds laughable, right? Except when you run that through an inflation calculator, it's roughly equivalent to £12,000 today — which is actually below the current minimum wage. So yes, the 1950s worker was earning what we'd now call poverty wages. And that's before we factor in that women in the same jobs were earning about half of that.
But here's where it gets interesting. While the wages were low, so was almost everything else. A pint of beer cost 6p. A loaf of bread was 2p. The average house — a terraced house, mind you, not a mansion — cost £1,940. Run those numbers and a typical family could just about cover the basics. Not comfortably. Not with much left over. But they could cover them.
Average house price. A typical worker needed about 6 years' salary to buy one. Today that ratio is closer to 8–10 years — and that's if you're being optimistic about London.
The thing that really shifts your perspective is the house price to salary ratio. In the 1950s, you needed about six years of average earnings to buy an average home. By the 1980s, it was still roughly three to four. Today we're talking eight to ten years — and that's the national average. If you're in London, good luck.
The decade when ordinary people discovered abroad.
The 1960s are often painted as a decade of optimism, colour, and possibility — and economically, they weren't wrong. Wages roughly doubled across the decade. In real terms, that's one of the biggest sustained wage increases of the last century.
More importantly, the 1960s gave ordinary British workers something genuinely new: the package holiday. Thomson launched its first tour to Majorca in 1965 for around £50 — roughly a month's wages for the average worker, but suddenly achievable. For millions of people, it was their first time on a plane. Their first time outside Britain. Their first time eating something that wasn't boiled.
"The package holiday wasn't just a holiday. It was the moment ordinary Britain realised there was a world outside the Butlin's caravan park."
Meanwhile, Harold Wilson was promising to forge the country in the "white heat of technology." Wages were rising, car ownership was doubling, and the M1 had just opened. By modern standards it looks modest. At the time, it felt like the future arriving ahead of schedule.
The decade that broke everyone's nerves about money.
Here's the thing about the 1970s that no graph quite captures: the sheer anxiety of it. Wages went up — average pay nearly trebled across the decade — but prices were chasing them so hard that people barely felt richer. Inflation hit 24% in 1975. Not 2.4%. Twenty-four.
The 1973 oil crisis sent petrol from 36p a gallon to a pound by the end of the decade. Bread doubled in price in two years. House prices trebled. Your pay rise would arrive and immediately feel like it had been swallowed whole by the cost of just existing.
This is the decade that made an entire generation permanently anxious about money. The grandparents who kept the heating off until November, who checked the bread price every week, who never quite trusted things to stay stable — this is where that came from. It's not irrational. It's learned. They lived through a decade when things could get twice as expensive in two years.
My gran compared prices in shillings well into the 1990s. I used to think it was eccentric. Now I think she just never quite trusted decimal currency, or anything else that arrived after 1970.
Big wages. Bigger house prices. Sound familiar?
The 1980s are a strange decade to look back on. In one sense, wages genuinely improved in real terms — inflation was wrestled down from 18% at the start of the decade to around 3% by the end, and wages rose significantly faster than prices for much of that period.
But the 1980s also set in motion the housing crisis we're still living in. Right-to-Buy launched in 1980, which was genuinely popular — over a million council houses were sold in the decade. But it also removed affordable housing from the public stock faster than it was being replaced, a problem that has compounded every year since.
Meanwhile, the City of London's Big Bang in 1986 turbocharged a particular kind of wage growth at the top. If you were in finance in the late 1980s, you were doing very well indeed. If you were a nurse or a teacher on a public sector pay scale, the picture was considerably less exciting.
How much house prices rose across the decade. Wages rose too — but not quite as fast, and not for everyone equally. The seeds of today's housing crisis were planted here.
It started terribly. It ended with Britpop. Go figure.
The 1990s opened with 15% mortgage rates, a brutal recession, and the concept of "negative equity" entering everyday British vocabulary. People who'd bought homes in the late 1980s boom found they now owed more on their mortgages than their houses were worth. Not a great vibe.
But by the mid-90s things had stabilised, and by the late 90s the economy was growing solidly. The big landmark was 1999: the National Minimum Wage arrived at £3.60 an hour. Laughably low now. But for the millions of workers — mostly women, mostly part-time — who had been earning less than that with no legal floor, it was a genuine, material improvement in their lives.
The decade everything was going fine, and then wasn't.
For most of the 2000s, the trajectory looked good. Wages were growing, unemployment was low, house prices were rising (which felt like good news if you owned one), and Ryanair made European city breaks accessible to people who'd never considered flying before.
Then came 2008. The financial crisis didn't just crash the economy — it froze wage growth for a decade. A generation of workers entered their 20s and 30s into a labour market that had been quietly, fundamentally changed. Wages that would have risen didn't. Careers that would have advanced stalled.
"The 2008 crash didn't just cost people money. It cost them the wage trajectory they'd been quietly planning their lives around."
The lost decade. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
The 2010s are sometimes called the "austerity decade," which is accurate but undersells quite how flat wages were for most workers. Public sector pay was frozen, then capped at 1% annually — for years. Private sector wages grew, but slowly. Real wage growth, once you stripped out inflation, was basically zero for most of the decade.
By 2019, real wages had just recovered to 2008 levels. Eleven years to get back to square one. And then a global pandemic arrived to remind everyone that economic stability was not something that could be taken for granted.
So where does that leave us in 2026?
The UK median salary is now around £38,600. Highest ever in nominal terms. In real terms — once you adjust for inflation — it's barely higher than 2008. Eighteen years of broadly stagnant purchasing power, interrupted by a cost-of-living crisis in 2022–23 that pushed energy bills to extraordinary levels and made a loaf of bread feel genuinely expensive for the first time in living memory.
The things that have got cheaper relative to wages: flights, electronics, clothing. The things that have got dramatically more expensive: housing, energy, childcare, eating and drinking out. The first list is full of stuff you can skip. The second list is mostly stuff you can't.
I find it genuinely hard to explain to people in their 20s that a pint used to cost 6p and a house used to cost £2,000. Not because the numbers aren't real — they are — but because the proportions were so different. The question isn't "what did things cost?" It's "what did it feel like to earn money in a world where those numbers made sense?"
The numbers change. The anxiety about them, it turns out, is pretty constant.
What would your salary look like under a UBI?
We'll come back to this in a separate post — but it's worth flagging here, because the wage history above is also a UBI history. Every decade we've looked at, there were workers who fell through the gaps: women paid less for the same work, part-timers without a wage floor, gig economy workers without rights, public sector workers whose real pay was being quietly eroded year on year.
Universal Basic Income is a conversation about what a floor looks like — and whether the market can ever reliably provide one on its own. The Wayback Wage suggests, rather strongly, that the answer has historically been: sometimes, for some people, for some decades. Which isn't really good enough.
More on that soon. For now — scroll back up and play with the calculator. Pick a decade. Pick a salary. And ask yourself: would you have been better off?