ROI Calculator

Use it for a share purchase, a rental property, a piece of equipment or a marketing spend, anything where you can state what went in and what came out.

1. Enter the Amount invested, the money you originally put in.
2. Enter the Final value (what you got back): the sale price, plus any income you received along the way.
3. Add any Extra costs and fees, such as commissions, repairs or transaction charges. Leave it at 0 if there were none.
4. Enter the Years held (0 to skip annualised return). Fractions such as 2.5 are accepted.
5. Choose a Currency symbol, then read the ROI, net profit or loss, total cost, money multiple and, if you gave a holding period, the annualised return.

Return on investment compares the gain with everything you spent: ROI = (final value - total cost) / total cost x 100, where total cost is the amount invested plus extra costs. The money multiple is final value divided by total cost.

Example one: invest 10,000, get back 14,500, no fees, held for 3 years. Profit is 4,500.00, ROI is +45.00% and the money multiple is 1.450x. Example two: invest 10,000, pay 500 in fees and sell for 8,000. Total cost is 10,500, the loss is 2,500.00 and ROI is -23.81%. The fees are why the percentage is worse than the 20% you might expect from 10,000 falling to 8,000.

What you enter as the final value changes the answer, so decide the rule before you start. For a rental property, include the sale price and the rent received, and put mortgage interest, repairs and agent charges under extra costs. For a marketing campaign, use the revenue that can fairly be traced to it. For shares, add dividends to the sale proceeds. Whatever rule you pick, apply it the same way when you compare two options, and keep the currency the same on both sides of the sum.

ROI says nothing about time. A 45% gain sounds the same whether it took one year or ten, so the calculator also gives the compound annual growth rate: CAGR = (final value / total cost)^(1 / years) - 1. For example one that is 13.19% a year over 3 years, alongside an average profit of 1,500.00 a year.

The second line has the larger ROI but the weaker yearly performance. The money multiple tells the same story in a different form: 1.600x means each unit put in came back as 1.6 units. Use the annual figure when comparing investments of different lengths. Note that the average profit per year is a plain division, not a compounding rate, so it will not match the percentage exactly. If the final value is 0 the annualised figure cannot be calculated and is left out.

ROI is a quick, honest summary, but it is not the whole story. It ignores inflation, tax and risk, and it treats all your money as arriving on one day. If you made several deposits or withdrawals, the timing matters and an internal rate of return is the right measure instead.

• Losses are lopsided: a 50% loss needs a 100% gain to recover.
• Income received during the holding period counts only if you add it to the final value.
• Past returns do not predict future ones.

To project steady growth forward, try the compound interest calculator; for a fixed-rate comparison see the simple interest calculator. If you are weighing a product sale rather than an asset, the profit margin calculator fits better, and the percentage calculator handles one-off percentage changes. This page gives an estimate for general information, not investment, financial or tax advice.