XIRR Calculator

How to use this XIRR calculator

Pick whichever mode matches how you actually invested, then enter your amounts. The calculator recalculates live as you type. Every calculation runs locally in your browser; see the privacy policy for details on what is never sent anywhere.

1. Regular investments (SIP): enter the date you started, how often you invest (every 14 days, monthly, quarterly, half-yearly or yearly), the amount per instalment, the end or valuation date, and the maturity or current value of the investment.
2. Irregular cash flows: add a row for every actual transaction, with its date, whether it was an investment (money in) or a withdrawal or value received (money out), and the amount.
3. Read the result: the calculator shows your annualised XIRR, total invested, total returned or current value, net gain, and the time span the calculation covers.

What is XIRR and how is it different from CAGR?

XIRR (Extended Internal Rate of Return) is the annualised return that makes the present value of every cash flow you entered, discounted back to the date of the first one, sum to zero. It is the correct return metric whenever money moves in or out of an investment more than once, on dates that are not evenly spaced: SIP instalments, an occasional top-up, a partial withdrawal, or simply checking the current value of an ongoing investment.

CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) only compares a single starting amount to a single ending amount over a fixed period. It has no way to account for money added or removed partway through, so applying CAGR to a SIP or to a portfolio with multiple transactions understates or overstates the real return, depending on when the extra cash flows happened. If your investment has exactly one inflow and one outflow, XIRR and CAGR give the same answer; the moment a third dated cash flow appears, they diverge. See XIRR vs CAGR for worked numeric examples of exactly where the two part ways.

A simple absolute return (final value minus invested amount, divided by invested amount) is even less useful for comparison purposes: it ignores time entirely, so a 20 percent gain over six months and a 20 percent gain over five years would look identical, even though the first is a dramatically better result on an annualised basis.

This matters most for anyone investing through a Systematic Investment Plan, because every SIP instalment is, by definition, a separate cash flow on its own date. An instalment from three years ago has had far longer to compound than one from last month, and XIRR automatically gives it more weight in the final annualised figure, exactly as a real investor's experience would suggest it should. A statement that simply divides total gain by total invested, without accounting for when each rupee went in, cannot make that distinction.

Worked example: a SIP with a lump-sum top-up

Suppose you invest 5,000 rupees on the first of every month starting in April 2022, add a 50,000 rupee lump-sum top-up in October 2023, and check the value of the investment on 1 April 2024 to find it is worth 2,50,000 rupees. Because the instalments and the top-up happened on different dates, a plain CAGR calculation cannot be applied directly. Entered as irregular cash flows, the calculation looks like this:

Enter each monthly instalment as its own row, plus the top-up and the final value, and the calculator solves for the single annualised rate that reconciles all of them. This is exactly the scenario the regular investments mode above automates: instead of typing 24 individual monthly rows by hand, you can enter the start date, frequency, instalment amount and final value once, and add the one-off top-up as an extra manual row when needed.

The XIRR formula, explained

XIRR solves for the rate r in the equation below, where each cash flow is discounted back to the date of the very first one using the actual number of days between the two dates, divided by 365:

Σ ( cashFlow_i ÷ (1 + r)^{days_i ÷ 365} ) = 0

Investments are entered as negative cash flows (money leaving your hand) and withdrawals or a final value are entered as positive cash flows (money you receive). Because the dates are irregular, there is no algebraic shortcut: the equation is solved numerically, by searching for the rate that makes the sum of all discounted cash flows equal zero. This calculator does that search itself, so you never need to open a spreadsheet or guess a starting rate.

XIRR vs IRR vs CAGR vs absolute return

If your money moved on more than two dates, or the dates are not evenly spaced apart, XIRR is the metric to use.

Common XIRR mistakes to avoid

XIRR is sensitive to both the sign and the timing of every cash flow, so small entry mistakes can move the result noticeably.

• Mixing up the sign convention: an investment (money leaving your pocket) must be negative, a withdrawal or final value (money you receive) must be positive.
• Forgetting the final value: if you still hold the investment, its current value on today's date counts as a cash flow too, entered as a withdrawal or value received.
• Rounding dates: entering the month-end instead of the actual transaction date can shift the result, especially over short time spans.
• Only one cash flow in and one out with no time gap between them: XIRR needs at least one investment and one return, separated by at least one day, to produce a meaningful annualised rate.
• Comparing XIRR figures from different tools without checking their day-count convention: this calculator uses a days-divided-by-365 convention, the same one Excel and Google Sheets use, so results should match exactly.
• Leaving out a partial withdrawal: if you took money out of an investment partway through, that withdrawal is a cash flow on its own and needs its own row, separate from the final value.
• Entering the current value as of an old date: if you are measuring an ongoing investment, use today's actual value on today's actual date, not the value from the last time you checked.

When should you actually check your XIRR?

There is no fixed schedule; checking too often mostly adds noise, since a recent instalment has barely had time to grow and can drag a short-term XIRR reading down even when the underlying investment is performing normally. A more useful habit is to check XIRR at meaningful milestones: once a year on the same date, whenever you consider a large top-up or withdrawal, or when comparing two different investments over the exact same start and end dates so the comparison is fair.

It is also worth recalculating whenever your cash flow history changes, for example after a top-up, a partial redemption, or a switch between fund options, since each of those is a new dated cash flow that changes the underlying calculation, not just the ending value.

How to calculate XIRR in Excel or Google Sheets

If you would rather check your numbers in a spreadsheet, both Excel and Google Sheets provide a built-in XIRR() function that uses the same calculation as this page. See the full step-by-step Excel and Google Sheets walkthrough for a worked example and fixes for the common #NUM! error.

• List every cash flow's amount in one column: investments as negative numbers, withdrawals or a final value as positive numbers.
• List the matching date for each amount in an adjacent column, in any order (both functions sort the dates internally).
• In an empty cell, enter =XIRR(values, dates) where values and dates refer to the two columns above.
• Format the result as a percentage. A third, optional guess argument is rarely needed; if the function returns an error, double-check that at least one amount is negative and at least one is positive.