I spend an unhealthy amount of my working life in the past. Not literally; my GP would have something to say about that. But a fair chunk of my fiction lives there, and you cannot drop a character into, say, 1985 without knowing what a packet of crisps might cost. Price a pint wrong, a reader in Mansfield will email you about it.
So I’ve done the research. Quite a lot of it, frankly, most of it while pretending it counts as proper work. Here, then, is roughly what life cost in Britain in 1985: the year of Live Aid, the very first episode of EastEnders, and a Ford Sierra that looked like the future and handled like a filing cabinet on castors.
What you earned, before anything else
The average full-time wage in 1985 landed somewhere around £6,900 a year. Call it £130-odd a week before the taxman helped himself. It doesn’t sound like much, and it never stretched as far as memory insists, but the trick with old money lies in resisting the urge to gawp at the number and instead asking what it actually bought. A wage only means something next to a price tag, in roughly the same way that winning millions on the lottery only means something next to how quickly a person can fritter it away.
The weekly shop, give or take
A pound of English Cheddar from Littlewoods came to £1.10. A 250g pack of West Country butter, 45p. Flora margarine cost 38p a tub, for the households who had decided butter would be the death of them. Maxwell House coffee ran to £1.33 for a 100g jar, and a six-pack of crisps from Sainsbury’s cost 69p, which works out at roughly eleven and a half pence a bag, or precisely the sum a child could extract from a grandparent with the correct facial expression. Four cans of Coca-Cola from Asda came to 63p, a price that feels less like history and more like a clerical error.
Down the pub
A pint of beer averaged 77p, though if you knew the right back-street boozer you could still find one nearer 69p, nursed slowly while the fruit machine quietly ate your change. Twenty Lambert & Butler King Size set you back £1.15, back when the pub doubled as a second living room: sticky carpet, a dartboard nobody used properly, and a man called Trevor who had been propping up the same corner since roughly the Coronation.
Getting about
Petrol cost around £2 a gallon, which sounds like a fairy tale until you remember the wage that paid for it. A brand-new Ford Sierra 1.3 Saloon would relieve you of £5,788, comfortably most of a year’s earnings, for a car whose chief talent lay in rusting the instant you parked it within sniffing distance of the sea. Still, it had a boot big enough for a fortnight in Tenby and a pine-tree air freshener swinging from the mirror that fooled precisely nobody. For a lot of families in 1985, that counted as having arrived.
The big-ticket dreams
Now we reach the part where the numbers stop being quaint and turn faintly horrifying. A 22-inch Grundig colour telly from Currys cost £339.99. A Sharp video recorder, £369.99: the better part of three weeks’ wages for the privilege of taping Bergerac and never once cracking how to set the timer. A Sinclair Spectrum+ went for £129.99, and somewhere in Britain a dad still insists it counted as an educational purchase.
And then the Motorola 8000X. The brick. The first proper mobile phone, yours for three thousand pounds, give or take half the average annual salary, for a device the size and heft of a breeze block that held perhaps twenty minutes of charge and functioned in approximately four postcodes. People bought them regardless, mostly so they could stand in the high street holding one at shoulder height where passers-by might admire it.
Keeping a roof over it all
The average house is where the whole exercise tips from nostalgic into genuinely upsetting. Depending on whose figures you trust, the typical British home in 1985 cost somewhere between £34,000 and £43,000. Either way, a sum a great many people now spend on a downstairs bathroom. Set that against a £6,900 wage and you begin to understand why everyone who bought a semi in 1985 remembers the era warmly, and everyone who has tried to buy one since remembers it a good deal less so.
And yet
And yet I would caution against full rose-tint. Mortgage rates in the mid-eighties could nudge towards double figures, unemployment ran high, and the country had only recently decided central heating might be worth the bother. The past makes a wonderful holiday and a terrible permanent address. Everything looks cheaper from here because we already know how the story ends; we choose to overlook the bits where the telly offered four channels and one of them shut up shop not long after midnight, leaving you alone with the hiss and your own questionable life choices.
The truth runs simpler than nostalgia allows: 1985 never came cheaper than now in any way that helps you. It simply earned less, owed more, and somehow felt lighter, possibly because nobody owned a phone capable of telling them otherwise.
Fancy actually going back?
If costing it all up has left you wanting to step into 1985 rather than merely price it, I can help with that. The ’86 Fix drops a fed-up forty-something back into 1986 with one shot at repairing the life he ended up with, Texan bars and Space Invaders included. Tuned Out sends a stressed millennial to 1969 to discover whether his parents’ generation really had it easier, which is the question hiding behind every one of these price lists. And A Page in Your Diary returns a man to the late eighties to undo the damage of a phone call he should never have made. All three cost considerably less than a 1985 video recorder, and not one of them needs the timer setting.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much did the average wage come to in 1985?
The average full-time wage in 1985 landed at roughly £6,900 a year, or about £130 a week before tax. Pay varied widely by job, region and gender, so treat it as a rough midpoint rather than a figure anyone took home to the penny.
How much did a pint cost in 1985?
A pint of beer averaged around 77p in 1985, though prices differed by region and pub. In some places you could still find a pint nearer 69p, particularly away from city centres and the smarter establishments.
How much did the average house cost in 1985?
Estimates put the average UK house price in 1985 somewhere between £34,000 and £43,000, depending on the source and the method behind the average. Set against typical wages of the day, it bought far more house than the same money would today.
How much did a TV or home computer cost in 1985?
A 22-inch Grundig colour television from Currys cost £339.99, while a Sinclair Spectrum+ home computer went for £129.99. A video recorder ran to around £369.99, which represented the better part of three weeks’ average wages.
Did life actually cost less in 1985?
In cash terms, almost everything cost less in 1985, but wages ran far lower too and mortgage rates often climbed into double figures. Things felt cheaper relative to nostalgia rather than relative to what people actually earned, so it pays to compare prices against the wages of the day rather than today’s.