CAGR Calculator

CAGR Calculator works out the compound annual growth rate: the single yearly rate that would take a starting value to an ending value over a given number of years. The formula is (end / start) to the power of (1 / years), minus one.

CAGR exists to make messy growth comparable. Real revenue, real investments and real user numbers do not grow smoothly; they jump, stall and sometimes fall. CAGR flattens all of that into one rate, which is what lets you say that one thing grew faster than another over the same period without arguing about which year to look at.

The same smoothing is its limitation, and it is worth being clear about. A business that grew 80% then fell 40% has the same CAGR as one that grew steadily to the same place, and they are not the same business. CAGR describes the start and the end. It says nothing at all about what happened in between, and it cannot show volatility. The year-by-year path shown here is the smoothed one, not the real one.

CAGR is also not the average of the yearly growth rates. Averaging percentages overstates growth, because a 50% rise followed by a 50% fall leaves you down 25%, not level. CAGR handles this correctly, which is the main reason to use it instead of a mean.

This is arithmetic, not financial advice. It tells you what the numbers do; it cannot tell you whether a decision is right for your circumstances. For anything that matters, check the figures against the actual offer and talk to someone qualified.

Everything is worked out inside your browser. Nothing you enter is uploaded, logged or stored, which matters for the financial calculators in particular: the figures you put into them are nobody else's business.

• CAGR from the standard formula
• Total growth over the whole period, as a percentage and as a multiple
• The smoothed year-by-year path, clearly labelled as smoothed
• Handles decline as well as growth
• Part years supported
• Shows why CAGR is not the average of yearly rates
• Runs in your browser

The cagr calculator is used by writers, developers, students, marketers and anyone else who needs the job done once without installing software. Common cases include:

• Comparing the growth of two businesses over the same period
• Reporting revenue growth in a way that survives a bad year
• Working out what yearly return an investment delivered
• Setting a growth target that is arithmetically possible
• Checking a growth figure somebody else has quoted