CAGR Calculator
Give it where an investment started, where it ended, and how many years passed, and it tells you the steady annual rate that connects the two.
How it works
CAGR answers a simple question: if this investment had grown at one steady rate every year, what would that rate be? It irons out the bumpy real-world path into a single clean figure you can actually compare.
Grow $10,000 into $18,000 over five years and the total gain is 80%, but the CAGR is about 12.5% a year. That compounding is why the yearly rate looks smaller than the headline total — each year builds on the last.
Because it's an annual rate, CAGR lets you stack investments held for different lengths side by side. A three-year run and a ten-year run become comparable, which is exactly why analysts lean on it instead of raw total returns.
Frequently asked questions
What is CAGR?
Compound annual growth rate — the constant yearly rate that would take a starting value to an ending value over a set number of years. It's a way to express lumpy growth as one smooth annual number.
How is CAGR different from average return?
A simple average just adds up the yearly returns and divides, ignoring compounding. CAGR accounts for gains building on gains, so it reflects what you actually ended up with. The two can differ a lot in volatile years.
Does CAGR account for deposits or withdrawals?
No — it only looks at the starting value, the ending value, and the time between them. If you added or pulled out money along the way, CAGR won't capture that, and you'd want a money-weighted return instead.