CAGR Calculator
Bought at one value and sold at another? Enter your beginning and ending value and the period to get the compound annual growth rate (CAGR), total return, and growth multiple in seconds. Enter years or dates. Works in any currency.
Period
Year-by-year growth schedule
| Year | Value |
|---|
Some values were above the allowed range and were capped for this calculation.
This is an arithmetic calculation, not investment advice.
Every calculation runs in your browser — nothing is sent to a server.
What CAGR Actually Measures
Compound annual growth rate answers one narrow question: if your beginning value had grown at a single, unchanging annual rate all the way to your ending value, what would that rate have to be? It is a smoothing device — a way to compress a multi-year, bumpy growth path into one comparable number. That makes CAGR the right tool whenever you need to line up results that happened over different lengths of time: a 3-year stock holding against a 7-year one, a startup's first two years of revenue against its next five, or two properties bought and sold on different schedules.
CAGR is not the same question as "how much did this grow in total" (that's total return, which ignores how long it took), and it's not the same question as "if I invest today at a fixed rate, what will I have later" (that's a forward-looking compound-interest projection built from an assumed rate). CAGR runs the arithmetic backward: you already know the start and the end, and you're solving for the single rate that connects them.
How to use this calculator
- Enter the beginning value — what you started with (purchase price, opening revenue, initial balance).
- Enter the ending value — what it became by the end of the period.
- Choose how to express the period: type a number of years (decimals like 3.5 work), or switch to dates and pick a start and end date — the calculator converts the exact day count into years for you.
- Pick a currency to format the gain and schedule figures — CAGR itself is a percentage and doesn't depend on currency.
- Press Calculate to see the CAGR, total return, absolute gain, growth multiple, and an expandable year-by-year schedule showing what the value would look like at each step along a smooth compounding path.
The formula behind the number
Divide the ending value by the beginning value to get the growth multiple. Raise that multiple to the power of one divided by the number of years — this is the step that "un-compounds" the total growth back into a single annual rate. Subtract 1 and multiply by 100 to read it as a percentage.
Three worked examples
Same total return, very different CAGR
Because the exponent in the formula divides by the number of years, one fixed total return maps to a different CAGR at every holding period. The table below shows this for a total return of 100% (the value doubles) — the classic "doubling time" relationship, in reverse:
| Holding period | Total return | Equivalent CAGR |
|---|---|---|
| 1 year | 100% | 100.00% |
| 2 years | 100% | 41.42% |
| 3 years | 100% | 25.99% |
| 5 years | 100% | 14.87% |
| 10 years | 100% | 7.18% |
| 20 years | 100% | 3.53% |
Mistakes that quietly distort a CAGR
- Reading CAGR as an actual yearly return. It's a geometric average over the whole path, not what happened in any single year — the real year-by-year numbers could include down years even when CAGR is comfortably positive.
- Confusing it with the arithmetic mean. Averaging yearly percentage changes directly overstates true growth once returns swing up and down; CAGR (the geometric mean) corrects for that "volatility drag" and is always the more honest figure across multiple periods.
- Rounding the period. A holding period of 3 years and 4 months entered as "3" (or "3.5" instead of the actual 3.33) shifts the exponent and skews the result — use dates mode when the period isn't a clean whole number.
- Applying it when money was added or withdrawn mid-period. This two-point formula assumes one lump sum in and one lump sum out. If you contributed or withdrew funds partway through, you need a money-weighted measure (such as XIRR), not a plain CAGR.
- Extrapolating it forward. A calculated CAGR describes what already happened between two known points — it is not a projection or a guarantee of the rate going forward.
What CAGR leaves out
Two investments can share an identical CAGR while one climbed in a straight line and the other fell by half twice before recovering — CAGR compresses the whole ride into one number and says nothing about volatility, drawdowns, or the risk you had to sit through to get there. It also says nothing about fees, taxes, or inflation unless you've already netted those out of your beginning and ending values yourself. Treat CAGR as a clean way to summarize and compare historical growth rates — not as investment advice, a forecast, or a substitute for looking at the full path a value took to get where it ended up.
Sources & further reading
- U.S. SEC Investor.gov — compound interest and growth-rate calculators
- Federal Reserve — official economic and financial data series for growth comparisons
- World Bank Open Data — annual growth rate indicators and methodology
- Khan Academy — interest and compounding fundamentals behind the CAGR formula
Frequently asked questions
What is CAGR, and why does it beat total return or a simple average for comparing periods?
CAGR (compound annual growth rate) is the single, steady yearly rate that would grow your beginning value into your ending value over the whole period, compounding each year. A total return of 60% sounds the same whether it took two years or eight, so you can't compare investments with it; a simple average return ignores compounding and overstates the truth. This compound annual growth rate calculator standardizes every result to one annual figure, so a fund held 3 years and a stock held 7 become an apples-to-apples comparison. That is exactly what an annualized return calculator is for.
What is the exact CAGR formula, with a worked example?
The formula is CAGR = (Ending value ÷ Beginning value)^(1 ÷ years) − 1, then multiplied by 100 for a percentage. Worked example: 10,000 grows to 19,500 over 3 years. The ratio is 19,500 ÷ 10,000 = 1.95; raise it to the power 1 ÷ 3 to get about 1.2493; subtract 1 to get 0.2493, so the CAGR is about 24.93% per year. As a cagr calculator this tool also shows the 95% total return, the absolute gain of 9,500, and the growth multiple of 1.95× side by side, so you see the same result four ways.
Years or dates — how are fractional periods like 3.5 years and leap years handled?
You can type the number of years directly (decimals allowed, so 3.5 works) or switch to the dates tab and enter a start and end date. In date mode this investment growth rate calculator counts the exact days between your dates and divides by 365.25 — the average length of a year including leap years — so a period that spans February 29 is measured correctly instead of being rounded to whole years. Because the exponent 1 ÷ years accepts any positive number, a half-year or a 7.3-year holding period is annualized just as precisely as a round number.
Can CAGR be negative, and why does an ending value of 0 show −100%?
Yes. If your ending value is below your beginning value the CAGR is negative — a real loss annualized, shown in red alongside a negative total return. If the ending value is exactly 0 the ratio is 0, and 0 raised to any positive power is still 0, so CAGR = 0 − 1 = −100%: a total loss over the period. That is a correct answer, not an error, so the tool labels it clearly rather than hiding it. A beginning value of 0 or a negative ending value has no meaningful growth rate, so the 연평균 성장률 계산기 asks you to fix those inputs instead of returning a misleading number.
Is the math currency-agnostic, is anything sent to a server, and is this investment advice?
CAGR is a percentage, so the growth rate itself is the same in any currency; only the absolute gain and the year-by-year schedule carry a currency, and those are formatted with your locale's grouping, symbol and decimal places through Intl — nothing is hard-coded. Every calculation runs entirely in your browser: no login, no account, and no prices fetched from any market feed — you type every value yourself, and your last entry is saved only in your browser's local storage. And this is an arithmetic calculation, not investment advice: it tells you the math of a growth rate, not whether to buy, hold or sell.