Historic Currency Calculator

Whenever you venture into the research of your ancestor's possessions, you typically hit this question pretty soon: how much was that in current-day money? What does it mean that your great-great-grandfather bought a house for 300 guilders? Use our historic currency converter to quickly convert old Dutch guilders to current-day money.

The purpose of this calculator is to give you an idea what this amount of money would have felt like to your ancestors. It tells you how the amount relates to the average wage of an unskilled Dutch worker in those years. It also translates that average wage to that of an unskilled Dutch worker today in current-day major currencies.

Using The Calculator

Using the historic currency calculator is easy:

1. Determine the amount you want to convert to guilders. You can use the list below to convert other coins to guilders:
   • cent: 1/100 guilder
   • daalder: 1.5 guilders
   • dubbeltje: 10 cents
   • duit: 1/8 stuiver
   • dukaat: 5 guilders
   • halfje: 1/2 cent
   • halve gulden: 1/2 guilder
   • halve stuiver: 2.5 cents
   • kwartje: 1/4 guilder
   • rijksdaalder: 2.5 guilders
   • stuiver: 1/20 guilder
   • tientje: 10 guilders
   • vierduitstuk or plak: 1/2 stuiver
   • vijfje: 5 guilders
2. Put the amount of guilders in the first field of the calculator.
3. Choose the year from which the amount stems.
4. Choose the currency you would like to convert to.
5. Hit the "convert" button.

The Math Behind The Calculator

So how does our calculator do the math? Actually, it is not that complicated:

1. It takes the amount of guilders you want to convert.
2. It looks up the average daily wage for the year you have indicated. (We use the historical wages lists supplied by the IISH for this).
3. It divides the amount you want to convert by the daily wage. Now we have the equivalent in days of work.
4. If the result is more than one day of work, it calculates the weeks or years of work. We assume a year consists of 365.25 days in a year (taking into account leap years), a week of 6 working days (people used to work 6 days a week up until the 1960s), and a month is 1/12 of 365.25.
5. It multiplies the resulting days of work with the current wages. (We have used Dutch minimum wages of 2010 for this).
6. It converts the result to your own currency using data from an online currency converter (www.xe.com).
7. It shows the result on the web page.

Our method aims to give you a feel for how the cost of something was related to the average wage in the time your ancestor lived, and how much the same average income is today in the Netherlands. We feel this makes more sense than to calculate the purchasing power of your ancestor and comparing it to that of an average person today. We feel that "purchasing power" is a concept one cannot easily relate to. However, knowing that the price of your ancestor's house felt to him like 10 years wages is easy to grasp. If you are interested, however, in calculating the purching power of your ancestors taking into account variables like devaluation and price fluctuations, try the online calculator of the International Institute of Social History.