The Dollar Book is a free, not-for-profit resource that makes large numbers and real-world money easier to picture. Every $ sign is $1 million; every page holds 3,000 of them; page 334 is $1 trillion. Pupils can find where the world’s wealthiest people sit, compare countries, and look up what 287 UK jobs pay before and after tax.
Show this on the board or put it in your lesson slides. Pupils scan the code or type the address:
thedollarbook.com/?school=1
The school link is remembered on that device. To go back to the full version, add ?school=0 to the address.
The full version of the site has an optional AI assistant and a voice search button. School mode switches both off, along with a few other things, so nothing a pupil types is ever sent to an AI service.
Everything else is unchanged: the wealth lists, the country lists and the search. The Career Guide is now its own page, with a country picker (UK, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Japan, Germany, France and Italy), gross and take-home pay for every job, and the Tax tables. Please preview the whole book before you use it with a class. It includes sections on politics and religion, and some entries cover public figures’ wealth, so you will want to decide what suits your pupils.
| Accounts or log-ins | None. Nobody signs up or gives a name or email. |
|---|---|
| Personal data collected | None on purpose. See the privacy policy. |
| Advertising, tracking, analytics | None. The site has no adverts and no analytics scripts. |
| Stored on the pupil’s own device | Only if they use “My Own Entries” or “My List”, plus the school-mode setting. This stays in that browser and is never sent to us. |
| Chat, messaging or sharing between pupils | None. Pupils cannot post, upload or message. |
| AI features | Off in school mode. There is no generative AI for pupils to use. |
| Outside services contacted in school mode | GitHub Pages (serves the site) and Cloudflare (supplies the live share prices behind a few of the largest fortunes). No pupil information is sent to either. As with any website, their standard server logs can include a device’s IP address. |
| Links to other sites | Each entry links to its Wikipedia page. These open only if a pupil taps them, and your normal school web filtering applies. |
If your data protection officer has questions or wants to see more, email privacy@thedollarbook.com.
These are suggestions to adapt, not a formal curriculum mapping. They suit maths, financial education, careers and PSHE or citizenship.
In the Career Guide, every job shows its salary in yellow and its take-home pay in blue, and opens to show exactly what the employer has to hold back. Pupils choose three jobs, work out how much is lost to tax and National Insurance in pounds and as a percentage, and compare their answers with the bands in the Tax tab. Switch the country to compare the UK with the US.
Before using the “Guess which page Elon Musk is on?” box, pupils estimate where he sits in a book that runs from $1 million to $1 trillion. Reveal the answer, then try other people. How many $ signs is one fortune? How many pages?
Pick a job from the Career Guide and a fortune from the top 20. Roughly how many years would the salary take to match the fortune? Write both numbers in standard form. Fortunes change daily, so treat the figure as a snapshot.
Choose a salary and work out the income tax using the Personal Allowance, Basic Rate and Higher Rate entries in the Tax section. Check it against the blue take-home figure. Why might the two differ slightly? (National Insurance and rounding.) Extension: the Tax Code entry explains the code on a payslip, such as 1257L, so pupils with a part-time job can check theirs.
Each entry in Countries of the World shows a country’s GDP and its population. Pupils pick five countries from different continents, divide GDP by population to get GDP per person, rank them, and discuss why a country’s total GDP and its GDP per person can tell very different stories.
Use the Career Guide and sort by highest pay. Find three jobs that pay above a chosen salary and compare the routes into them under “How to get in”. Which need a degree, and which are open through apprenticeships or training?
Pupils pick an entry, follow its source link and decide whether the figure is supported. Where could it be out of date? Pupils can send a correction request, which is a good way to see how sources and estimates work.
Spotted a mistake? Email privacy@thedollarbook.com with the subject “Correction Request”. We aim to review requests within 5 working days.