Money
Estimate how an investment could grow over time, or work backward to calculate what it may take to reach a financial goal.
Choose the question you want the calculator to solve.
Estimate the future value of an investment using a starting balance, recurring contributions, an expected annual return, and time.
You can enter money with or without properly placed commas, such as 1000000 or 1,000,000. Expected return is entered as an annualized return.
Estimated future value
Enter your assumptions to see how contributions and investment growth combine over time.
Results assume a constant annualized return for calculation purposes. Actual investment returns will vary.
Investment growth
The chart separates the money you put in from the growth produced by the assumed investment return.
Contributions include your starting investment and all recurring contributions.
Accumulation schedule
Follow the estimated balance, new contributions, and investment growth from year to year.
| Year | New contributions | Growth | Total invested | Ending balance |
|---|
Investment calculator guide
An investment calculator is useful for more than answering “how much will this be worth?” It can also help you work backward from a goal, compare different saving rates, test different return assumptions, and see how much of a future balance comes from your own money versus investment growth.
The important part is understanding what the calculation represents. Markets do not produce the same return every year, inflation changes what future dollars can buy, fees and taxes can reduce what you keep, and no historical return guarantees a future result. The calculator is therefore best treated as a planning model rather than a prediction.
The calculator can solve the same investment problem from several directions. Instead of requiring every input and always returning only an ending balance, you can choose the unknown that actually matters to you.
Use Future Value when you know how much you already have, how much you plan to contribute, how long you plan to invest, and the annual return you want to model.
The result estimates your ending balance and separates your own money from investment growth.
Use Time to Goal when you know the balance you want to reach and want to estimate how long it could take under your contribution and return assumptions.
Use Required Contribution when you have a target amount and a target date but want to know how much you would need to invest each month or year.
Use Starting Investment when you know your goal, recurring contribution, expected return, and timeframe and want to determine how much would need to be invested at the beginning.
Use Required Return to determine the constant annualized return that would mathematically be necessary to reach a goal using the other assumptions you entered.
This is especially important to interpret carefully. A required return is a mathematical result, not evidence that such a return is realistic or available.
Compounding happens when earlier investment gains remain invested and can themselves generate additional gains. In other words, growth can build on both the money you originally invested and the growth that has already accumulated.
The SEC's Investor.gov describes compound interest as interest earned on both principal and accumulated interest. Investments such as stocks do not literally pay a fixed interest rate in the same way as a savings account, but the same compounding principle applies when investment gains remain invested.
Time matters because compounding is cumulative. A dollar of growth earned early in a long investment period has more opportunities to participate in later growth than a dollar earned near the end.
Compounding receives most of the attention, but recurring contributions can be just as important to the final result. Especially in the earlier years, much of an account's growth may come from money being added rather than market returns.
The stacked chart in this calculator makes that distinction visible: green represents the cumulative money invested, including the starting amount, while blue represents investment growth.
A contribution made at the beginning of a month or year has slightly more time to grow than the same contribution made at the end of that period. Over a long timeframe, repeatedly giving each contribution one additional period of growth can create a noticeable difference.
That is why this calculator asks when contributions are made rather than silently assuming that every deposit occurs at the same point in the period.
There is no single annual return that is correct for every investment. The appropriate assumption depends on what is being modeled, the mix of assets involved, the length of the investment period, costs, and how conservative or aggressive you want the projection itself to be.
A useful way to use the calculator is to run more than one scenario. For example, you might compare a lower-return case, a middle case, and a higher-return case rather than treating one percentage as a promise about the future.
These percentages are examples for sensitivity testing, not recommended returns or forecasts. The point is to see how strongly the result changes when the return assumption changes.
Return differences compound. A one- or two-percentage-point difference may look small over one year, but applying that difference repeatedly over decades can produce very different ending balances.
This also works in reverse. If the Required Return mode says that your plan needs an unusually high annual return, the result may be telling you more about the goal, contribution level, or timeframe than about what you should try to earn.
Historical stock returns are useful context, but they are not a smooth line. A long-run average compresses many very different years into a single number.
Aswath Damodaran's historical U.S. return data reports annual S&P 500 returns including dividends going back to 1928. The series shows the scale of that variation. For example, the S&P 500 total return was about -43.84% in 1931 and +52.56% in 1954. More recently, the same series reports about -36.55% in 2008, -18.04% in 2022, +26.06% in 2023, +24.88% in 2024, and +17.78% in 2025.
It means the calculator is using a constant annualized rate to create a simplified growth path. Actual returns can be negative, strongly positive, or close to zero in individual years.
Historical return figures can also differ depending on what is being measured. A price-return index measures changes in index prices. A total return includes distributions such as dividends as well as price changes.
When comparing a calculator assumption with historical stock-market data, make sure you know whether the historical number includes reinvested dividends. The Damodaran historical series referenced above includes dividends in its S&P 500 return figures.
An average return does not describe the path taken to reach it. Two periods can have similar average returns but very different year-to-year experiences.
That matters because investors add and withdraw money over time. A large loss early or late in an investment period can affect a real portfolio differently from the smooth constant-return path shown by a calculator.
Investment returns are often discussed in nominal terms, meaning the percentage increase in dollars without adjusting for inflation. A real return accounts for the effect of changing prices and therefore gives more information about purchasing power.
That subtraction is a useful mental approximation. The mathematically exact relationship is multiplicative, so the simple subtraction becomes less precise when the percentages are large.
This calculator intentionally does not mix an inflation adjustment into the main result. The displayed ending balance is a nominal dollar amount based on the return assumption you enter. Inflation is a separate consideration when deciding what that future balance might actually buy.
Inflation matters because the number of dollars in an account and the amount those dollars can purchase are not the same thing.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics defines the Consumer Price Index (CPI) as a measure of the average change over time in prices paid by urban consumers for a market basket of goods and services. BLS also explains that as prices rise, the purchasing power of a dollar declines.
Suppose an investment grows substantially over several decades. The nominal ending balance may be much larger than the starting balance, but prices may also be higher by then. The future balance therefore should not automatically be interpreted as having the same purchasing power that the same number of dollars has today.
Only if you deliberately want to build a rough real-return scenario. Otherwise, enter the nominal return assumption you want to model and interpret the calculator's result as future nominal dollars.
Mixing a real return with nominal future goals can make the calculation internally inconsistent. If your goal is stated in future dollars, a nominal-return model is usually the cleaner comparison. If both the goal and return have been converted into today's purchasing-power terms, then a real-return model can be appropriate.
Fees reduce the portion of a portfolio that remains invested and able to compound. The effect can become substantial over long periods even when an annual fee looks small.
The SEC's Office of Investor Education and Assistance specifically warns that fees and expenses reduce investment returns because they reduce the amount of money remaining in the portfolio to earn future returns. Depending on the investment and account, costs can include fund expense ratios, advisory fees, commissions, account fees, sales charges, and other expenses.
This calculator does not have a separate fee input. If you want a rough net-of-fee projection, one approach is to reduce the annual return assumption by the annual percentage cost you expect to bear. That is only an approximation because not every fee is charged in the same way.
Taxes depend heavily on the account and investment. A taxable brokerage account, traditional retirement account, and Roth account can produce different after-tax results even when the underlying investments earn the same pre-tax return.
The IRS explains that traditional IRA earnings generally are not taxed until distribution, while qualified Roth IRA distributions can be tax-free under the applicable rules. Traditional 401(k) elective deferrals and investment gains generally receive tax deferral until distribution, while Roth contributions are treated differently.
Because tax treatment depends on account type, income, transactions, holding periods, and current tax law, this calculator leaves taxes out of the growth calculation rather than pretending that one tax rate fits every investor.
The calculator answers a different question: what happens if an investment compounds at a specified annualized rate over the selected period?
Modeling an actual sequence of market returns would require assumptions about when gains and losses occur. There are effectively unlimited paths that could produce a similar long-term average, and nobody knows the future sequence in advance.
The constant-return model is therefore useful for comparing scenarios, contribution levels, and time horizons, but it should not be mistaken for a forecast of the route an actual portfolio will take.
It depends on the return earned. Enter $10,000 as the starting investment, set recurring contributions to $0, choose 20 years, and test the annual return assumptions you want to compare.
There is no universal monthly amount. In this calculator, select Required Contribution, enter your starting amount, target balance, timeframe, and return assumption, and it will solve for the recurring contribution required by that mathematical scenario.
Select Time to Goal and enter $1,000,000 as the investment goal. The answer will depend on your starting balance, recurring contribution, contribution timing, and assumed annual return.
No single rate is appropriate for every investment. Rather than relying on one assumption, compare multiple scenarios and consider whether the rate is consistent with the type of investment you are modeling, its risk, costs, and your timeframe.
The calculator does not separately identify dividends. If the annual return you enter is intended to represent a total return with dividends reinvested, then the resulting projection effectively models that total-return assumption.
No. The calculator reports nominal future dollars. Inflation is discussed separately because purchasing power and investment growth are related but distinct calculations.
No separate fee is deducted automatically. Fees vary by investment, account, and service provider, and they can reduce long-term investment growth.
No. Tax treatment differs substantially between taxable accounts and tax-advantaged accounts such as traditional and Roth retirement accounts, so a single automatic tax adjustment would often be misleading.
The calculator is solving the mathematics needed to hit the target. A large target, short timeframe, small starting balance, or low contribution can force the required return upward. That does not mean the resulting return is realistic or likely.
No. It calculates what would happen under the assumptions entered. The SEC cautions that past investment performance does not necessarily predict future results, and actual market returns vary substantially from year to year.
The educational discussion above uses information from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's Investor.gov resources on compounding, investment performance, and fees; the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index resources; IRS materials concerning traditional and Roth retirement accounts; and Aswath Damodaran's historical U.S. investment-return data from New York University's Stern School of Business.
Historical figures are included for context only. They are not forecasts and are not used automatically as the calculator's return assumption.
This calculator and guide are educational tools. Results are estimates based on the assumptions entered and are not guarantees of investment performance, tax outcomes, or future purchasing power.