SIP Calculator
Free SIP calculator to estimate the maturity value of your monthly mutual fund SIP. See invested amount, estimated returns and growth chart instantly.
Formula last reviewed 15 September 2026 · How we verify our calculators
Total value
- Invested amount
- ₹6,00,000
- Estimated returns
- ₹5,61,695
Updates live as you type
Frequently asked questions
A Systematic Investment Plan is a standing instruction to invest a fixed amount in a mutual fund at a fixed interval, almost always monthly. It is not a product in its own right — you are buying an ordinary mutual fund, just in instalments rather than all at once. The amount stays constant while the unit price moves, so you automatically accumulate more units when markets fall and fewer when they rise. Most people use it because it converts investing from a recurring decision into a background process.
Each instalment compounds for a different length of time, so the maturity is the sum of every instalment grown separately. The future value of an annuity-due formula does this in one step: M = P x [((1 + i)^n - 1) / i] x (1 + i), where i is the monthly rate and n the number of instalments. The final (1 + i) reflects that fund houses treat money debited on the SIP date as invested from that day. A common hand-estimate — multiplying the monthly rate by the number of months — badly understates the result because it ignores returns compounding on earlier returns.
No, and the distinction matters more than any other caveat on this page. Mutual fund returns are market-linked, and the figure you enter is an assumption you have supplied, not a rate anyone has promised you. Equity funds routinely go through multi-year stretches of flat or negative returns on the way to a reasonable long-run average. A practical way to handle this is to run the calculation at 10% and at 14% and plan against the lower number, treating the output as a range rather than a single figure.
Yes. Almost every fund house lets you increase, decrease, pause or stop a SIP, and most now offer a step-up facility that raises the instalment automatically each year. A step-up matters a great deal over long horizons: a flat instalment held for twenty years while your income triples leaves a lot on the table. If your platform does not support automatic step-ups, the manual equivalent is to start a small additional SIP each time you get a raise rather than editing the existing one.
Yes, and the way a SIP is structured makes it slightly more involved than a lump sum. Each instalment has its own holding period, so when you redeem, the units bought in the last twelve months are short-term and the older ones are long-term. For equity funds, long-term gains are taxed at 12.5% above a 1.25 lakh annual exemption, while short-term gains are taxed at 20%. Funds are redeemed on a first-in-first-out basis, which generally works in your favour because the oldest and most likely long-term units go first.
Not automatically — it depends on whether you actually have a lump sum. If your money arrives monthly from a salary, a SIP is simply the only option and the comparison is academic. If you already hold a large amount in cash, historical data slightly favours investing it at once, because markets rise more often than they fall and money held back earns nothing meanwhile. What a SIP genuinely buys you in that situation is protection against the regret of investing everything the week before a crash, which for many people is worth the small expected cost.
Nothing serious. The fund simply does not receive that month's money, and your bank may levy a small charge for the failed mandate. Your existing units are unaffected and the SIP continues the following month. Fund houses usually cancel a SIP only after three or so consecutive failed debits. If money is tight, reducing the instalment is far better than stopping altogether, because restarting requires a decision you may not make.
Long enough for the compounding to outweigh the contributions, which at a 12% assumption typically takes eight to ten years. Before that crossover, most of your balance is simply your own money returned to you, which is why investors who quit around year four conclude the method does not work — they leave just before it starts to. Tie the horizon to the goal rather than to market conditions: an equity SIP suits anything beyond roughly five years, and is the wrong vehicle for money you need within three.
It does the opposite of what people expect. The instalments made during a downturn buy the most units at the lowest prices, and those are the units that do the most work in the eventual recovery. Pausing during a fall means you skip exactly the purchases that rupee-cost averaging depends on, while your existing units decline anyway. If you need to reduce risk, the lever is usually the asset allocation you chose at the start, not the timing of instalments.
What will your SIP actually be worth?
₹5,000 a month feels small. Kept up for ten years at a 12% return, it becomes ₹11,61,695 — and the part that surprises most first-time investors is that ₹5,61,695 of that, almost as much as the ₹6,00,000 you actually paid in, is pure return. That gap between what you put in and what you end up with is the entire case for starting a SIP early rather than "once I have more to invest."
A Systematic Investment Plan is not a product. It is a method of buying one — an instruction to your bank to debit a fixed amount on a fixed date each month and hand it to a mutual fund, which converts it into units at whatever that day's NAV happens to be. You are buying the same fund a distant investor might buy in one lump sum; you are simply buying it in instalments, at whatever prices the market offers along the way.
That mechanical difference has a behavioural consequence worth naming. Because the amount is fixed and the price is not, a falling market automatically buys you more units and a rising market fewer — the effect usually called rupee-cost averaging. It does not guarantee a better outcome than investing everything at once (historically, lump-sum investing wins slightly more often, because markets rise more often than they fall). What it reliably does is remove the decision. You are never sitting on cash wondering whether this is the right week, which is the failure mode that costs ordinary investors far more than suboptimal timing ever does.
How the maturity figure is calculated
Each instalment is a separate investment that compounds for a different length of time. Your first ₹5,000 has the full ten years to grow; the one you pay in the final month has essentially no time at all. The maturity value is the sum of all of those individually compounded instalments — which is exactly what the future value of an annuity-due formula computes in one step:
M = P × [((1 + i)ⁿ − 1) / i] × (1 + i)
- M — maturity value, what you end up with.
- P — the monthly instalment (₹5,000 here).
- i — the *monthly* rate, not the annual one. A 12% expected annual return becomes 12 ÷ 12 ÷ 100 = 0.01.
- n — the total number of instalments: years × 12, so 120 for a ten-year SIP.
The bracketed term is the compounding engine: it sums the growth factors of every instalment from the first to the last. The trailing (1 + i) is what makes this an annuity-*due* rather than an ordinary annuity — it credits each instalment with one extra month of growth, because most fund houses treat money debited on the SIP date as invested from that day rather than at month end.
This is why hand-estimating a SIP goes wrong. People multiply the monthly rate by the number of months and get a figure far below the truth, because that shortcut ignores that early instalments compound on top of the returns earned by even earlier ones.
Working through ₹5,000 a month for ten years
Take P = 5,000, i = 0.01, n = 120.
Step 1 — grow ₹1 for 120 months. (1.01)¹²⁰ = 3.3004. A rupee invested at the start would have tripled.
Step 2 — the annuity factor. (3.3004 − 1) ÷ 0.01 = 230.04. Read this plainly: 120 instalments of ₹1 each, invested a month apart, are worth ₹230 at the end — not ₹120.
Step 3 — the due adjustment. 230.04 × 1.01 = 232.34, crediting each instalment that extra month.
Step 4 — scale to your instalment. 5,000 × 232.34 = ₹11,61,695.
Against ₹6,00,000 actually invested, the return is ₹5,61,695.
Now watch what happens when only the tenure changes. Hold the same ₹5,000 for twenty years instead of ten and the maturity is ₹49,95,740 — you doubled the money you paid in, from ₹6 lakh to ₹12 lakh, and the corpus grew more than fourfold. Compare that against doubling the *amount* instead: ₹10,000 a month for ten years gives roughly ₹23.2 lakh, less than half the twenty-year result. Same total contribution in both cases; the one with more time wins decisively.
When a SIP is the right instrument
A SIP fits when three things are true: the money arrives in instalments rather than as a lump, the goal is far enough away that equity's short-term volatility has time to wash out, and you would otherwise struggle to invest consistently.
That describes most salaried investing — retirement contributions beyond EPF, a child's education fifteen years out, a house deposit eight years out. It describes new investors especially well, because the automation substitutes for a conviction you have not yet developed.
It fits badly in two situations. If your goal is under about three years away, an equity SIP is the wrong vehicle regardless of how disciplined you are — a bad final year can leave you below what you contributed, with no time to recover. And if you already hold a large sum in a savings account, drip-feeding it as a SIP is not obviously better than investing it at once; you are simply choosing certainty of process over an expected return that slightly favours the lump sum.
Reading your projection honestly
The maturity figure is a projection from an assumption you supplied, not a forecast. Change the expected return from 12% to 10% and the ten-year result drops by roughly ₹1.3 lakh, without anything about your behaviour changing. That sensitivity is the point: treat the output as a range, not a number. Run it at 10% and at 14% and plan against the lower figure.
The split between invested and returns is the more useful reading. Early in any SIP, invested dominates — after three years most of your balance is simply your own money. The crossover, where returns exceed contributions, typically arrives somewhere around year eight to ten at a 12% assumption. Investors who quit at year four, having seen little growth, are quitting precisely before the mechanism starts to work.
One more adjustment: the corpus is in future rupees. ₹11.6 lakh in ten years does not buy what ₹11.6 lakh buys today. At 6% inflation its purchasing power is closer to ₹6.5 lakh in today's terms — which still comfortably exceeds the ₹6 lakh you invested, but is a far less dramatic number than the headline.
Where SIP projections mislead
Assuming the return is smooth. The calculator applies 12% every month. Real equity funds deliver something like +30%, −12%, +7%, +22% in sequence. You end up in a similar place over long periods, but the path includes stretches — sometimes multi-year — where your balance sits below what you have paid in.
Forgetting tax. Equity fund gains held over a year are long-term and taxed at 12.5% above a ₹1.25 lakh annual exemption. Crucially, each instalment has its own holding period, so a SIP redeemed in year ten contains units of every age, and the most recent twelve months' worth are still short-term, taxed at 20%. The maturity figure here is pre-tax.
Ignoring the expense ratio. The return you enter should be the fund's return net of its expense ratio. If you use a headline index return of 12% against a fund charging 1.2%, you are overstating the outcome by roughly that margin every year — which over twenty years is a large number.
Treating a flat SIP as realistic. Very few people invest the same amount for twenty years while their income triples. A step-up of even 10% a year changes the outcome substantially; modelling a flat SIP understates what you could actually build.
Stopping during a fall. The instalments made during a downturn buy the most units and do the most work in the eventual recovery. Pausing a SIP when the market drops inverts the one structural advantage the method gives you.