XIRR Calculator
Calculate XIRR — the annualised return on investments with multiple cash flows like SIPs. Enter your monthly investment, duration and final value to find your true rate.
Formula last reviewed 4 August 2026 · How we verify our calculators
XIRR (annualised)
- Total invested
- ₹6,00,000
- Net gain
- ₹2,00,000
Updates live as you type
Frequently asked questions
XIRR (Extended Internal Rate of Return) is the annualised return on a series of cash flows that occur at irregular intervals — exactly the case with monthly SIPs and partial redemptions.
CAGR assumes a single investment and exit. SIPs invest money at many different times, so each instalment compounds for a different period. XIRR accounts for that and gives the correct rate.
It finds the discount rate that makes the net present value of all cash flows equal to zero, solved numerically with Newton-Raphson and a bisection fallback.
There is no universal benchmark, but for equity investments a long-term XIRR comfortably above inflation and fixed-deposit rates is generally considered healthy.
The only honest return figure for a SIP
Invest ₹10,000 a month for five years — ₹6,00,000 in total — and end with ₹8,00,000. The gain is ₹2,00,000, which looks like a 33% return. Spread across five years that might sound like 6.7% a year. The true annualised return is 11.43%.
The gap exists because your money was not invested for five years. Your first instalment was; your last was invested for a month. On average each rupee worked for roughly two and a half years, so the same ₹2,00,000 gain represents a much higher *rate* than a five-year view suggests.
XIRR — extended internal rate of return — is the figure that accounts for this. It finds the single annual rate at which every individual cash flow, discounted from its own date, sums to your final value.
How it is computed
XIRR solves for the rate r that satisfies:
Σ [ Cᵢ ÷ (1 + r)^(dᵢ ÷ 365) ] = 0
where Cᵢ is each cash flow (investments negative, redemptions positive) and dᵢ is the number of days between that flow and the first one.
There is no closed-form solution. The rate is found by iteration — guessing, checking whether the sum overshoots or undershoots zero, and narrowing until it converges. This is exactly what the XIRR function in a spreadsheet does, and what this calculator does internally.
The crucial feature is that XIRR is date-aware. A ₹10,000 investment made in month one and another made in month fifty-nine are weighted entirely differently, which is what makes it correct for SIPs, irregular top-ups, partial redemptions and any other uneven pattern.
Worked through
For the example: sixty outflows of ₹10,000, one per month, then a single inflow of ₹8,00,000 at month sixty.
Iterating, the rate that balances the equation is 11.43%. Sanity-check it: at 11.43% annualised, the first instalment grows over five full years to about ₹17,180, the thirtieth over two and a half years to about ₹13,180, and the last barely at all. Sum all sixty and you land at ₹8,00,000.
Note how different this is from the other two common measures. Absolute return is 33.3%. CAGR computed on ₹6,00,000 to ₹8,00,000 over five years would give 5.92% — badly understated, because it pretends the whole ₹6 lakh was invested from day one. Only XIRR handles the actual schedule.
When to use which
XIRR — any investment with multiple cash flows on irregular dates: SIPs, SIPs with top-ups, partial withdrawals, insurance premiums, real estate bought in construction-linked instalments.
CAGR — a single investment in and a single value out, with nothing in between.
Absolute return — only for describing total growth over a period, never for comparing across different durations.
Most fund platforms report XIRR for your portfolio precisely because almost every real investor's pattern is irregular.
Reading the result
A reasonable long-run XIRR for an Indian equity SIP is broadly 10–14%. Well above that over a short period usually reflects a favourable market phase rather than skill, and reverts. Well below may be normal if the period included a prolonged downturn — SIP XIRR is highly sensitive to what the market did near the *end* of the period, because that is when the corpus is largest.
That end-weighting is worth internalising. A SIP running ten years with a crash in year nine shows a poor XIRR even if the preceding eight years were excellent, because most of the accumulated value is exposed to the final move.
XIRR is also pre-tax. Equity gains beyond twelve months are taxed at 12.5% above ₹1.25 lakh a year, and each SIP instalment carries its own holding period.
Common mistakes
Comparing your SIP's XIRR against a fund's published CAGR. The fund's figure assumes a lumpsum on day one. They are different measures and rarely equal.
Judging XIRR over short periods. Under three years it is dominated by recent market movement and says little about the investment.
Forgetting to include every cash flow. Omitting a top-up or a partial redemption invalidates the result entirely.
Expecting XIRR and CAGR to agree. They agree only when there is exactly one inflow and one outflow.