SIP Calculator

A SIP calculator projects what a series of regular investments could grow to. You give it three things — how much you invest each time, how often, and for how long — plus one assumption about the rate of return, and it works out the total you would have put in, the growth that assumption implies, and the value at the end.

It is worth being precise about the division of labour. The arithmetic is exact and this page does it exactly: the projection comes from a month-by-month ledger, the year-wise table is folded up from that same ledger, and every column reconciles to the totals rather than approximating them. The assumption is not exact, and nothing can make it so. A SIP calculator is a machine for exploring the consequences of an assumption, not for discovering the right one.

Each instalment is a separate investment that grows for a different length of time. The first one you pay into a ten-year SIP compounds for 120 months; the last one compounds for a single month. The projected value is the sum of all of them, each grown by however long it was actually invested.

That is why a SIP cannot be worked out by taking the total invested and applying a growth rate to it. ₹12 lakh invested as ₹10,000a month over ten years does not behave like ₹12 lakh invested on day one — the average rupee has been in for roughly half the term, which is precisely the difference this calculator’s SIP-versus-lump-sum comparison shows.

This tool runs the whole thing as an explicit ledger: every month, the instalment goes in first, then the entire balance grows by one twelfth of the assumed annual rate. It produces the same figure as the published formula for a plain monthly SIP — they agree to the last decimal — while also handling quarterly instalments, part years and a step-up where the amount changes every twelve months, none of which the one-line formula can express.

The published formula for a monthly SIP is:

• P is one instalment, not the total. ₹10,000 a month for ten years is P = 10,000 and n = 120, never P = 12,00,000.
• r is monthly. A 12% assumption is r = 0.01, not 0.12. Getting this wrong by a factor of twelve is the single most common mistake when people check a calculator by hand in a spreadsheet.
• The bracket is the future value of a stream of ₹1 instalments — it counts up the compounding, so multiplying it by P scales the whole schedule.
• The trailing (1 + r) is the beginning-of-period adjustment, covered in the next section.

There is one case the formula cannot express: when the assumed return is zero, r is zero and the bracket divides by zero. The answer is obvious — you get back exactly what you put in, FV = P × n — but it has to be handled separately, and a calculator that returns NaN or an error at 0% has not handled it. Set the expected return to 0 here and you will get ₹12,00,000 back from ₹12,00,000 invested.

This calculator treats every instalment as invested at the startof its period, so the money you pay on the first of the month earns that month’s return. That is the standard SIP convention and it is what the trailing (1 + r) in the formula encodes: one extra month of growth on every instalment.

The alternative — end-of-period, where each instalment starts earning the following month — drops that factor and lands about one month’s growth lower. On ₹10,000 a month at 12% for ten years the gap is roughly ₹23,004, which is small enough to look like a rounding error and large enough to make you doubt one of the two calculators. If a figure here differs slightly from another tool, this convention is the first thing to check.

The same assumption is applied everywhere on this page — the summary, the schedule, the comparisons, the goal calculator and every export — so no two sections can disagree with each other.

• Pick the investment type. Monthly is the default and by far the most common.
• Set the instalment, either by dragging the slider, typing an exact figure, or tapping one of the quick amounts from ₹500 to ₹1 lakh. The slider stops at ₹5 lakh but the box does not — type any amount you like and it will be used as typed.
• Set the expected return. Twelve per cent is the conventional default. Try 8 and 15 as well before settling, because the spread tells you how much the answer rests on the assumption.
• Set the duration in years, plus extra months if you need a part year.
• Turn on Step-up SIP if you plan to raise the instalment each year, and set the annual increase.
• Read the three headline figures, then move through the tabs: the growth chart, the year-by-year and month-by-month schedule, the one-variable comparisons, the step-up table, and the goal and inflation tools.
• Copy the summary, export the schedule as CSV or JSON, print to PDF, or share a link that reproduces the exact scenario.

Compounding is growth earning growth. In month one, only your instalment grows. By month sixty, the balance growing is mostly previous growth, and by the final years of a long SIP the monthly growth can exceed the monthly instalment several times over.

The year-by-year table makes this visible. On ₹10,000 a month at 12%, the growth in year one is a few thousand rupees; by year twenty it is a multiple of everything invested that year. Nothing about the rate changed — only the size of the balance it applies to.

There is a second, quieter effect worth knowing. The rate you enter is a nominalannual rate applied as one twelfth per month. Because each month’s growth then earns growth of its own, 12% nominal compounds to 12.68% effective over a year. Both figures are shown in the summary. It also explains a common discrepancy between tools: one that compounds annually instead of monthly will report a slightly lower figure from identical inputs.

A monthly SIP is what almost everyone means by the term, and it is the default here. Quarterly and yearly instalments exist for people whose income arrives that way — business receipts, an annual bonus, agricultural income.

There is a result here that surprises people: for the same annual total, paying less often projects higher. ₹30,000 a quarter beats ₹10,000 a month by about 1% over ten years, and ₹1.2 lakh once a year beats it by about 5.5%. The reason is arrival dates and not returns — the quarterly instalment puts the whole quarter in on day one instead of spreading it across three months, so it is invested earlier and earns for longer.

That is not an argument for switching. It is a projection under a constant rate, where being invested earlier is always better because the rate never falls. Under a rate that moves, spreading purchases across more prices is the point of the exercise — and a monthly instalment is far easier to budget for than a lump every quarter.

This is the assumption everything else rests on, and it is the one part of the calculation nobody can do for you. Twelve per cent is the figure most Indian calculators default to, including this one. It is a convention, not a forecast, and it deserves to be treated as one.

What this tool can do is show you how much the answer moves when the assumption moves. The Compare tab runs your exact SIP at 8, 10, 12, 14 and 15 per cent side by side. Over a twenty-year term the spread between the top and bottom rows is usually large enough to change what you would decide, and noticing that is more useful than any single number on the page.

Two practical notes. If you are trying to ground the assumption in something you already hold, the CAGR calculator turns a start value, an end value and a number of years into the annualised rate that connects them. Different kinds of fund have historically behaved very differently, so one assumed rate across a mixed portfolio is a rough average at best. And whatever figure you pick, the calculator applies it to every month identically — which nothing in a market has ever done.

Every number this page produces is an estimate derived from an assumption you supplied. Mutual funds are market-linked. Their value rises and falls, they can lose money over stretches measured in years, and past performance does not establish what comes next. Nothing here is a promise of an outcome, and no figure on this page should be read as one.

The language is deliberate throughout: estimated returns, assumed return, projected value, hypothetical scenario. Those words are doing real work. A projection is a sentence with an “if” at the front, and dropping the “if” changes what it claims.

Use the output to compare options — this instalment against that one, this duration against a longer one, a flat SIP against a stepped-up one — and to see how sensitive each answer is to the rate you assumed. Do not use it as a prediction of what any particular fund will do, and take an actual investment decision with the scheme documents and a qualified adviser rather than a calculator.

Every figure below assumes a 12% annual return and a monthly instalment held flat for the whole term. They are computed by the same engine that powers the calculator above.

Across the columns, the relationship is not proportional at all. Here is ₹10,000 a month at 12%, by duration:

A step-up SIP raises the instalment by a set percentage at the start of every year, on the assumption your income does the same — if you are matching it to an actual raise, the percentage calculator gives you the increase between two salary figures. A 10% step-up on ₹10,000 means ₹10,000 a month in year one, ₹11,000 in year two, ₹12,100 in year three, and so on.

This calculator builds the exact schedule. Each year’s instalment is computed and run through the ledger separately, so the projection reflects the real shape of the payments. Approximating a step-up by scaling a flat SIP by an average multiplier is meaningfully wrong over long terms, because the later, larger instalments are precisely the ones with the least time to grow and an average treats every rupee alike.

The effect is large. On ₹10,000 a month at 12% over twenty years, a 10% annual step-up takes the projection from ₹99.91 Lakh to ₹1.99 Crore — almost exactly double. It is bought entirely with extra instalments: ₹68.73 Lakh invested rather than ₹24 Lakh, ending on a final instalment of ₹61,159 a month.

That final instalment is the number to check before anything else. At a 20% step-up it reaches about ₹3.2 lakh a month by year twenty. The step-up table carries it as a column for exactly this reason — a table showing only the outcome makes the increase look like something you get for free.

Under a constant assumed rate, a lump sum always wins, and the Compare tab shows it doing so with your own numbers. The reason is arithmetic rather than strategy: every rupee is invested for the full term instead of an average of about half of it.

Two things keep that from being a recommendation. The comparison assumes you have the whole amount on day one — which is the exact situation a SIP exists to handle when you do not, and most people do not. And it assumes a rate that never moves. Under a rate that actually moves, the order depends entirely on when the falls happen: a lump sum invested just before a long decline can take years to catch a SIP that kept buying through it.

What the comparison is genuinely useful for is sizing the gap. If a lump sum you do not have would project 20% more, that is worth knowing; it is not an argument for waiting until you have one. For a lump sum on its own — no monthly stream — the compound interest calculator is the more direct tool.

Investing a fixed rupee amount at regular intervals means you automatically buy more units when the price is low and fewer when it is high. The arithmetic consequence is that your average cost per unit ends up below the average price over the period — not equal to it, below it. That is a real effect and it is the main argument for spreading purchases out.

It is worth being clear about what it is not. Rupee cost averaging does not protect against loss: if the price falls throughout and stays down, averaging in means losing less than buying at the top would have, which is a smaller claim than it is often made to sound. And this calculator does not model it at all — a constant assumed rate has no price variation for averaging to work on. The effect belongs to real markets, not to the projection.

The Goal and inflation tab runs the calculation backwards: name a target, and it works out the instalment that reaches it over the duration and assumed rate you have already set. The formula is the main one inverted:

Because the projected value is exactly proportional to the instalment, this inversion is exact rather than approximate, and it generalises: the same approach gives the right answer for a quarterly SIP or one with a step-up, neither of which has a tidy closed form. Feed any answer it produces back into the main calculator and it lands on the target.

At 12% a year, reaching ₹1 crore takes about ₹19,819 a month for fifteen years, ₹10,009 for twenty, or ₹5,270 for twenty-five. The required instalment is only as good as the assumed rate, so it is worth checking the same goal at 10% before treating any of these as a plan.

The main projection reports a value in the money of the year it is reached. That is the correct way to state it, and it is also the reason a large future number feels more impressive than it should. The inflation tool converts it into today’s money:

At 6% inflation — roughly the long-run Indian CPI average — ₹1 crore in twenty years buys about what ₹31 lakh buys today. Over thirty years the same ₹1 crore is worth about ₹17 lakh in current terms. Neither figure means the investment failed; it means the unit of measurement changed.

The tool also reports the real annual return, and it divides rather than subtracts: 12.68% effective against 6% inflation is 6.30% a year, not 6.68%. The subtraction is the version almost everyone uses and it flatters the answer at every rate.

The Schedule tab shows one row per investment year: what you invested that year, the cumulative total, the growth the assumed rate added, the balance at year end, and the cumulative gain. It switches to the full month-by-month ledger, paged a year at a time, with the opening balance, instalment, growth and closing balance for every month.

Two details are worth pointing out. The growth column rises every year even though the rate never changes — that is compounding, visible as a column of numbers rather than described. And the columns add up exactly to the totals in the summary above, because both come from the same computation and full precision is carried throughout; only the display is rounded. A schedule that does not reconcile to its own total has rounded somewhere it should not have.

Both views export as CSV with headings that name the figures honestly — projected value, estimated growth — because a spreadsheet outlives the page it came from and a column called “returns” three years from now should still say what it actually was.

A projection is only honest if it says what it leaves out. This one leaves out:

• Tax. Every figure is pre-tax. In India, gains on equity funds held beyond a year are taxed as long-term capital gains with an annual exemption, shorter holdings at the short-term rate, and debt-oriented funds differently again. Those rates and thresholds are set by the Finance Act and have been revised more than once recently, so check the current rules rather than any figure baked into a calculator. SIPs add a wrinkle: each instalment buys units on its own date and so has its own holding period.
• Exit loads. Charged on redemption within a set period, and entirely outside this model.
• The expense ratio, at least not separately — it is already deducted before the NAV you see is published, so a rate based on historical NAV growth has it baked in.
• Missed or paused instalments, changes of scheme, switches, and anything else that makes a real schedule irregular.
• Volatility. The projection applies one rate to every month. This is the largest omission by far, and no amount of decimal places compensates for it.

If you want to project net of a cost you believe is not already reflected, the practical move is to lower the assumed rate by that amount rather than to look for a field that models it.

• Entering the total instead of the instalment. P is one payment. Putting ₹12,00,000 in the monthly field projects a fantasy.
• Using the annual rate as the monthly rate when checking by hand. r is 0.01 for a 12% assumption, not 0.12.
• Treating the default rate as a forecast. Twelve per cent is a convention that every Indian calculator inherited from every other one.
• Comparing a nominal figure to a present-day cost.A projected ₹1 crore in twenty years is not today’s ₹1 crore; run the inflation adjustment before deciding it covers a goal.
• Assuming the projection is what you will receive. It is pre-tax, pre-exit-load, and assumes you never miss an instalment or stop early.
• Reading one number instead of the spread. The most useful thing on this page is how much the answer changes when the assumption changes.

Everything runs locally in your browser. Your investment inputs are never uploaded to our server, never stored, and never sent to an analytics endpoint. There is no account to create, because there is nothing being kept — the calculation is JavaScript running on your own machine, and closing the tab is the whole of the deletion process.

The one exception is one you control. The share button puts your scenario into the URL and hands you the link; the figures travel inside it, so you can read exactly what you are about to send before you send it, and there is no identifier tying it to you. Downloads and printing are the same — the file is produced in the browser and saved to your own disk.