CAGR Calculator
Enter what you put in, what it is worth now, and how long you held it. You get the CAGR, and more usefully, what is left of it after inflation. Not headline CPI, but a blended rate you build from your own general, healthcare and education spending, because those three move at very different speeds in India.
Your inflation
Headline CPI understates what most households actually face, because healthcare and education rise much faster than the basket. Set what each category costs you and how much of your spending goes there, and this works out the rate that applies to you.
General
Whatever is left over
Healthcare
Education
CAGR
12.14%
₹1.0 L grew to ₹2.5 L in 8 years
Real CAGR
+4.60%
What it is worth after 7.20% inflation
Wealth multiplier
2.50×
Times your money grew
How does your return compare?
India benchmarks: historical long-run CAGRs, with your own blended inflation for reference
How this is calculated
CAGR formula
CAGR = (Target / Initial)^(1 / Years) − 1
Initial and Final are the two rupee figures you enter, Years is the slider. CAGR is just an annualised growth rate, the steady percentage that would have taken you from one to the other.
Real CAGR
Real CAGR = ((1 + nominal) ÷ (1 + inflation)) − 1
Note this is not nominal minus inflation, which is the shortcut most people use. A 9% return at 6% inflation gives 2.83%, not 3%. The gap looks trivial and stops looking trivial once you compound it for thirty years. The inflation figure used here is the blended rate you build below, not a fixed 6%.
Blended inflation
Blended = (general% × general rate + health% × health rate + education% × education rate) ÷ 100
A weighted average, nothing cleverer. Defaults are 6% general, 12% healthcare and 10% education, with 10% of spending going to healthcare and 15% to education. Those shares are a starting point, not a claim about your household. Set healthcare and education to what you actually spend and the remainder is treated as general.
Benchmarks used above
This calculator compares your number against the same India-specific defaults used across the site. See the assumptions behind these defaults for the full list and the reasoning.
A worked example: Sandeep's SIP
Sandeep, 41, works in Coimbatore. He started a SIP in an index fund in April 2016 with a lump sum top-up of ₹2,00,000, and by March 2026 his statement shows the combined holding is worth ₹7,84,000. Ten years. He wants to know what rate that actually works out to, because his RM keeps saying "it's done well" without a number attached.
The CAGR formula is (Final / Initial)^(1/Years) − 1. Plug in his numbers: (7,84,000 / 2,00,000)^(1/10) − 1. The ratio inside the brackets is 3.92. Raise that to the power of 0.1 and you get roughly 1.145. Subtract 1 and multiply by 100. Sandeep's money grew at about 14.5% CAGR over ten years.
That's above the long-run Nifty 50 average, which tracks. His window happened to include the 2020 crash and the sharp recovery that followed, and a ten-year window that starts and ends at favourable points will always print a rate that looks better than the long-term average. Run the same money through a window from 2018 to 2028 and the number moves. A lot.
How to read the number
CAGR tells you the single steady rate that would have taken your starting value to your ending value over the years in between. It does not tell you the path. Sandeep's 14.5% did not arrive as 14.5% every year, it arrived as a rough patch in 2020, a sharp year in 2021, and a lot of ordinary years in between that averaged out to something smoother than any of them individually.
What it does tell you: if you want to compare two investments held for different periods, or compare your portfolio against a fixed deposit that compounds cleanly every year, CAGR is the right tool. It strips out the noise of when money went in and came out and gives you one number to argue with.
Common mistakes
The most frequent one: treating CAGR as the same thing as average annual return. They are not. Say a fund returns +50% in year one and −33.3% in year two. The simple average of those two numbers is +8.3%, which sounds fine. But ₹1,00,000 growing 50% becomes ₹1,50,000, and then falling 33.3% brings it back down to exactly ₹1,00,000. The CAGR over those two years is 0%. Not 8.3%. Averaging percentage returns lies to you whenever the sequence includes a big loss.
The second mistake is trusting a single CAGR number as a measure of how bumpy the ride was. Two funds can post the identical 12% CAGR over ten years while one of them never dropped more than 15% in a bad year and the other one fell 60% in 2020 and clawed its way back. The CAGR field is blind to that. If you care about what a bad year does to your nerves, or your withdrawal plan if you're already retired, you need the drawdown numbers too, not just the headline growth rate.
A third, smaller trap: forgetting that CAGR ignores cash flow timing. If Sandeep had added money every month instead of a single lump sum, a plain CAGR calculation on start and end values would misstate his actual return, because it assumes the whole amount was invested from day one. For SIPs, the correct measure is XIRR, not CAGR. This calculator is for lump-sum comparisons, not for SIP performance.
What this doesn't model
This tool has no idea what you actually paid in or when. Give it a start value, an end value, and a number of years, and it will produce a CAGR whether or not those two values had any real cash flow connecting them the way the formula assumes. It also can't tell you anything about taxes. Sandeep's ₹5,84,000 of gains, if he sells today, is subject to 12.5% LTCG above the ₹1,25,000 exemption on equity mutual funds. That tax bill doesn't show up anywhere in a CAGR figure, so a headline 14.5% overstates what actually lands in his bank account.
And it says nothing about the future. A fund that compounded at 14.5% for the last ten years carries no promise of doing it again for the next ten. Use CAGR to understand what happened, not to forecast what will.
A note worth reading before you act
The FIRE math works - but equity returns are not a guarantee. Every projection on this site uses long-term historical averages as a baseline. Markets can and do deliver a decade of poor returns, and if that decade happens to be the early years of your retirement, it puts real pressure on even a well-sized corpus. This isn't a reason to not pursue FIRE. It is a reason to build in margin.
The single most effective safety net is an active income source - even a small one. Freelance work, consulting, a part-time role, rental income. If your portfolio has a bad year and returns 6% instead of 12%, ₹15,000–₹25,000 a month of outside income means you don't have to redeem units at a loss while the market is down. You simply wait.
Financial independence is worth building towards. But “retired” doesn't have to mean “never earns again.” Keep a skill that someone will pay you for. Treat your corpus target as a floor, not a finish line. The goal is resilience - not just a number.
Not financial advice. planMyFIRE is not a SEBI-registered Investment Adviser. Calculator results are estimates based on historical assumptions and are for educational purposes only. Past market returns do not guarantee future performance. Consult a SEBI-registered adviser before making investment decisions. Terms of use.