How much money is that, really?
A million and a billion are one letter apart and a thousand times apart. On a logarithmic scale the difference is impossible to miss.
2.38 × a median US house
1,000,000 USD is more than 6 of the 11 references on this page.
Reference figures are measurements and are rounded; the unit conversion behind them is exact.
| Reference | Size | Yours ÷ theirs | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| cup of coffee | 5 USD | 200,000× | |
| video game | 70 USD | 14,286× | |
| smartphone | 900 USD | 1,111× | |
| used car | 25,000 USD | 40× | |
| median US household income | 80,610 USD | 12.4× | Per year, 2023 |
| median US house | 420,000 USD | 2.38× | |
| private jet | 20,000,000 USD | 1/20 | |
| blockbuster film budget | 250,000,000 USD | 1/250 | |
| nuclear power plant | 9,000,000,000 USD | 1/9,000 | |
| Apple | 3,400,000,000,000 USD | 1/3,400,000 | Market capitalisation |
| world GDP | 105,000,000,000,000 USD | 1/105,000,000 |
Worth knowing
- A million seconds is 11.6 days. A billion seconds is 31.7 years. That is the gap people keep failing to picture.
- Spending a million dollars at $1 000 a day takes under three years. Spending a billion at the same rate takes 2 740 years.
Frequently asked
How much bigger is a billion than a million?
A thousand times. If a million dollars were a metre tall, a billion would be a kilometre.
Why is there no currency conversion here?
Because it needs live exchange rates, and a static site cannot fetch them honestly. Every comparison on this page is a ratio, which holds in any currency.