Enter a start value, end value, and number of years to instantly calculate CAGR. Use it for investment returns, revenue growth analysis, and business planning.
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CAGR = (End / Start) ^ (1 / Years) − 1Say revenue went from 120M to 210M over three years. "Grew 75%" is true, but it cannot be compared with another business unit, because that one may have grown over five years or over two. Comparing growth across different time spans needs a common unit, and that unit is the compound annual growth rate.
CAGR answers a single question: if this had grown by the same percentage every year, what percentage would that be? Even if all the growth landed in year one and year two was flat, CAGR flattens the path into one annual figure. That is why investment returns, market-size forecasts and business-plan assumptions are almost always stated as CAGR.
The most common mistake is adding up the annual growth rates and dividing by the number of years. With +100% in year one and −50% in year two, the arithmetic mean is +25%, but the value went 100 → 200 → 100 and ended exactly where it started. The true annual average is 0%.
CAGR = (End ÷ Start) ^ (1 ÷ Years) − 1 solves this with multiplication. Growth compounds rather than adds, so the average has to be geometric to land on the real end value. Compounding the start value at this calculator's CAGR for the given number of years reproduces the end value exactly.
If you need the reverse: a future value from a start value and a rate: switch to the Compound Growth tab above, which solves the same equation in the other direction.
CAGR summarizes the past; it does not promise the future. A 20% CAGR over the last three years does not mean next year will be 20%. It is especially inflated when the starting year happened to be unusually low, so it is worth shifting the start and end years by one and checking whether the number moves a lot.
Count periods, not years. From the end of 2023 to the end of 2026 there are four calendar years but only three periods. That off-by-one changes the CAGR noticeably.
'Compound growth' and 'growth projection (future value)' differ only in name and context: the calculation is identical, and it runs the opposite direction from CAGR. Where the CAGR tab derives an annual rate from a start and end value, the Compound Growth tab derives a future value from an initial value and a rate: Final Value = Initial × (1 + Rate / 100) ^ Periods. Working out what an initial 10,000 becomes after growing 10% a year for five years, and projecting what this month's 5,000 users become after a year of 8% monthly growth, are the exact same problem in formula terms.
So putting a principal amount in the initial value field makes it a compound final-value calculator, while putting in a current business metric: revenue, users, traffic: makes it a growth projection calculator that looks into the future.
The key is that each period's growth applies to the accumulated total so far, not the original value. Simple growth adds the same amount each period, but compounding applies the rate to the grown value, so the increase accelerates over time. The longer the horizon and the higher the rate, the more dramatically compound and simple growth diverge.
Enter a negative rate to model compound decline, where the value shrinks by a fixed percentage each period: useful for churn-driven user decline or depreciation scenarios.
Any period unit works as long as it matches the rate: use months if your rate is monthly, years if it's annual. Because the same starting value can end up very differently with small changes to rate or periods, entering optimistic, base, and conservative scenarios side by side helps you size the range of outcomes.
A projection assumes a constant rate every period, so if growth varies, split the horizon into segments and calculate each. Everything runs in your browser and your inputs are never sent to a server.
"20.5% a year" compares across time spans in a way that "75% over three years" cannot. Check it: multiply 1.205 by itself three times and you get roughly 1.75.
Averaging the yearly rates arithmetically gives +25%, yet nothing actually changed. That gap is exactly why growth rates should be averaged with CAGR.
Declines use the same formula and come out as a negative CAGR, which works just as well for metrics like churn or cancellations where going down is the goal.
Simple interest would give 50,000,000 × (1 + 0.12 × 5) = 80,000,000. Even at five years the compounding gap is over 8 million.
Lining up conservative, base and aggressive cases makes it obvious which assumption your target number is leaning on.
What it is, who it's for, how it works and why you'd use it.
A CAGR Calculator computes the Compound Annual Growth Rate: the smoothed annual growth rate that describes how much a value grew each year on a compounded basis.
It is for investors, PMs, and business owners who need to compare multi-year growth across different time periods or asset sizes.
CAGR = (End / Start) ^ (1 / Years) − 1. The result is the annualized growth rate assuming constant compounding.
CAGR normalizes growth across different time spans, making it the standard metric for comparing investment returns or business growth rates.