I’m a high school history teacher. One of the classes I teach is American History since the Civil War and every unit/time period I cover, I have to look up information about cost of living and wages and dollar comparisons because the students really like that. For instance, if I say that the average immigrant in 1890 earned X dollars, what does that actually mean? How could students compare it to today? What did the average apartment rent cost in the year X? Etc. I feel like I can’t find one comprehensive source that clearly outlines these basics—like some sort of cheat sheet of the essential comparisons during 1880s, 1920s, 1950s, etc. Ideally with some basic subgroups differentiated. I obv use sites like gov’t hist census data, historical dollar conversion websites, and various historical resources, usually just focused on a single time period or subject.
It would be so nice to have a single, usable, clear, easy to read and search resource that provides this general info for American history. (One that is quicker to read than the tiny print on historical census data available online.) Does this make sense or am I just being lazy!?? I am tempted to just compile my own but don’t want to reinvent the wheel if it already exists. This question might be more suited for history teachers specifically, but figured I’d start with this sub first.
I think you can get close to what you're looking for with the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
For example, this article tracks household expenditures by category over a 100-year span in the US as a whole, New York alone, and Massachusetts alone. Here is a table from 1901.
This article is about family budgets in particular.
Their very first survey was done in 1888–1891, so it doesn't quite reach back as far as you're looking for; just note that methodology did change over time, so it's hard to be absolutely consistent apples-to-apples when looking at data (for example, the 1908-1909 family budget in the paper I just posted is specifically for a "Cotton mill worker") but that kind of interpolation seems like it'd be a good activity for a history class.