Work out what an investment really earned: total return, annualized rate, and the real inflation-adjusted return — with contributions handled properly.
What you put in, what it is worth now, and how long you held it.
The long-run US average is 3.07% a year (CPI-U, 1928–2025). Set it to 0 to see nominal returns only.
Past returns describe what happened, not what will happen. This tool is for education, not investment advice.
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A balance that grew from $10,000 to $15,000 is a 50% total return — but over five years that is 8.45% a year, and after 3% inflation it is 5.29%. Those three numbers describe the same investment and answer different questions. This calculator gives you all three at once, and handles the case most tools skip: money added along the way.
The rate of return is the gain or loss on an investment as a percentage of what you put in. Total return covers the whole holding period; the annualized rate restates it as an equivalent per-year figure so investments of different lengths can be compared; the real rate strips out inflation to show what the money actually gained in buying power. The three can point in different directions — a 2% savings account has a positive nominal return and a negative real one.
Real rate of return (Fisher equation)
Annualized rates put a two-year holding and a nine-year holding on the same footing.
Contributions mode solves the money-weighted rate, which is the honest measure once you have been paying in monthly.
See immediately whether an account is beating inflation or quietly losing to it.
Annualizing a six-month result shows what the pace implies, and flags how much of that is extrapolation.
A 100% gain is superb over three years and mediocre over thirty. Without the period, a total return figure cannot be judged at all.
Between 1928 and 2025 US prices rose 3.07% a year. Any return below that lost purchasing power, however positive the balance looked.
A 50% loss followed by a 50% gain averages zero but leaves you down 25%. The annualized rate reports the 25%; a simple average does not.
Deposits made near the end had barely any time to compound. Dividing the final balance by everything you put in credits them with the full period and flatters the result.
For a single lump sum, divide the final value by the initial value, raise the result to the power of 1 divided by the number of years, and subtract 1. For $10,000 growing to $15,000 over five years: (15,000 ÷ 10,000)^(1/5) − 1 = 8.45% a year.
Divide, do not subtract. The real rate is (1 + nominal) ÷ (1 + inflation) − 1. At 10% nominal and 3% inflation that gives 6.80%, not the 7% you get by subtracting. The gap is the cross-term, and it widens as both rates rise. This is the Fisher equation.
Total return is the whole gain over the whole period, with no reference to time. The annualized return is the constant yearly rate that would have produced the same result. A 100% total return is 100% a year over one year and 7.18% a year over ten.
You compound it, not multiply it. A 20% gain over six months annualizes to 1.20² − 1 = 44%, not 40%. Treat any annualized figure from a short period as an extrapolation: it assumes the same pace holds for the rest of the year, which is rarely true.
Because a start-to-finish formula assumes every dollar was invested for the whole period. Once you are depositing monthly, the last deposit had one month to work and the first had years. The calculator switches to a money-weighted return — the internal rate of return, which solves for the single rate that makes all the cash flows balance.
It depends on the risk taken and what inflation was doing. As a reference point, the S&P 500 returned about 10.0% a year in nominal terms between 1928 and 2025, or roughly 6.7% a year after inflation. Investment-grade corporate bonds returned about 6.6% nominal over the same period.