CAGR Calculator

CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) is the single, steady annual growth rate that would take an investment from its starting value to its ending value over a given period, if it had grown at exactly the same rate every year. Real investments rarely grow at a perfectly steady rate — CAGR smooths out the year-to-year ups and downs into one comparable number.

Absolute (total) return ignores time — it's simply how much your money grew as a percentage of what you started with, whether that happened over 1 year or 10. CAGR annualises that growth, so it accounts for how long it took. A ₹1 lakh investment that becomes ₹1.5 lakh has a 50% absolute return whether it took 1 year or 5 years, but the CAGR is very different — 50% in the 1-year case versus about 8.4% in the 5-year case.

CAGR assumes a single lump sum invested once and left untouched until the end — it only works cleanly when there's one initial value and one final value. XIRR (and similar annualised-return methods) handle irregular cash flows — multiple investments and withdrawals at different dates, like a SIP — which CAGR isn't designed for. If you've made a single one-time investment, CAGR is the right measure; for a SIP or multiple transactions, an XIRR-style calculation is more accurate.

Yes — if your final value is lower than your initial value, CAGR will be negative, correctly reflecting that the investment lost value on an annualised basis. This calculator doesn't hide or clamp a negative result, since it's a meaningful and valid outcome, not an error.

Use the forward mode: enter what you originally invested (or the price/NAV when you bought in) as the initial value, its current value as the final value, and how long you've held it as the duration. The result tells you the annualised return you've actually earned so far — useful for comparing against a different fund, a fixed deposit, or any other benchmark rate on a like-for-like basis.