SIP Returns
What a monthly SIP grows into, how much of that is your own money, and a year-by-year ledger showing compounding doing most of the work in the final stretch.
Project your SIP live · nothing leaves the page
§1The formula
A SIP is an annuity: the same amount invested at the start of every month, each instalment compounding for however long it stays in the market. For a fixed monthly SIP the closed form is:
The trailing (1+i) is there because you invest at the start of the month, so every instalment earns one extra month. With a step-up, the SIP amount itself grows every 12 months and this calculator switches to a month-by-month loop — same maths, no closed form.
Nearly two-thirds of the final corpus is growth, not contributions — and most of that growth arrives in the last five years. Compounding is back-loaded; the ledger above shows it.
§2The gotchas
Equity returns arrive lumpy — a couple of great years, a crash, a flat stretch. Two investors with the same average return but a different sequence of returns end up with different corpuses, because your later (larger) balance is exposed to whatever the market does then. Treat the projection as a planning number and stress-test it at 9–10%.
A 10% annual step-up lifts the example above from ₹50.5 lakh to about ₹86.8 lakh — and the gap keeps widening with tenure, roughly doubling the corpus over the longest horizons. Your income rises most years anyway; letting the SIP rise with it costs nothing you'd notice today.
Equity fund gains held over a year are taxed at 12.5% LTCG beyond ₹1.25 lakh of gains per year, and most funds charge an exit load (typically 1%) on units redeemed within a year. The number above is pre-tax; on a large corpus the LTCG haircut at redemption is real money — redeem in tranches across financial years to use the ₹1.25 lakh exemption more than once.
The fund factsheet's return is point-to-point (CAGR). Your SIP return is money-weighted (XIRR) — early instalments compound for 15 years, last month's for one month. In a market that ends on a high your XIRR beats the CAGR; end on a dip and it lags. Judge your SIP by its XIRR, not by the fund's headline number.
§3Related
Want the guaranteed, tax-free counterpart? See the PPF calculator. Comparing against a lumpsum in the bank? Start with the fixed deposit calculator.