Nominal price

A nominal price is a commodity price expressed in the currency units of the year it was recorded, with no adjustment for inflation.

A nominal price is simply the price as it was recorded at the time, in the currency units of that day, with no adjustment for how much that currency was worth. It is the number that appeared on an invoice or a market report in a given year, and it is what most historical price tables show by default.

Nominal prices are useful for understanding what a buyer or seller actually paid or received at the time, but they are misleading for comparing value across long spans of time, because inflation alone pushes nominal prices upward even when nothing about supply or demand has changed. Converting a series of nominal prices into real prices with a deflator is the standard way to make a fair comparison across years. See nominal vs real prices.