SIP calculator that is honest about the assumption
Project a monthly investment forward, with an optional annual step-up that reflects how income actually grows. The return you enter is an assumption you are choosing — the calculator says so.
Investment projection
Set the monthly amount, the return you want to assume and the horizon. Add a step-up to model contributions that grow with your income.
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What the SIP projection is and is not
Every figure on this page rests on one number you chose: the expected annual return. Change it by two percentage points and a fifteen-year projection moves by a very large amount. Treat the output as a way to compare scenarios against each other, not as a forecast of what you will have.
D is the monthly amount, i is the monthly return (annual ÷ 12 ÷ 100) and n is the number of instalments. With a step-up enabled the calculator drops the closed form and iterates month by month instead, because the contribution changes each year.
Why time dominates everything
Contributions made in year one compound for the entire term; contributions made in the final year barely compound at all. This is why starting five years earlier tends to beat contributing substantially more later, and it is the one lever in the whole calculation that cannot be recovered once spent.
The step-up is the realistic setting
Almost nobody invests the same amount at forty that they did at twenty-five. A step-up of even 5–10% a year tracks how income actually grows, and because the increases arrive relatively early in a long horizon they compound hard. Run your plan flat, then run it with a step-up, and compare the two corpus figures.
Sequence risk, in one paragraph
Two portfolios can average the identical return over twenty years and end up in very different places, because when the bad years arrive matters. A calculator that applies a smooth average — this one included — cannot show that. It is the strongest argument for planning against a conservative assumed return and for not stopping during a fall.
Questions people actually ask
A systematic investment plan is a standing instruction to invest a fixed amount every month into a fund. It is not a product with a guaranteed rate — it is a habit applied to whatever the fund returns, which is why every figure this calculator produces is a projection under an assumption you choose, not a promise.
That is the honest hard part. Long-run equity returns in most markets have historically fallen in a broad band, but any particular decade can land well outside it, and the sequence matters as much as the average. Run the calculator two or three times at different rates — a pessimistic one, a middling one, an optimistic one — and plan around the pessimistic figure.
It raises your monthly contribution by a set percentage every year, which is what most people can genuinely do as income grows. Because the extra money goes in early relative to the end of the term, a 10% annual step-up compounds into a much larger corpus than the same total contributed flat. Turn it on and compare.
Mathematically, investing a lump sum earlier usually wins, because the money has longer to compound. Behaviourally, a SIP wins for most people, because it does not require having the lump sum, it removes the temptation to time the market, and it buys more units when prices are low. The calculator's fixed deposit tab handles the lump-sum case if you want to compare.
No — the corpus shown is nominal and gross. To think in today's money, subtract your expected inflation rate from the return you enter. Fund expense ratios come out of returns before you see them, and capital gains tax applies on redemption in most markets. All three make the real outcome smaller than the headline figure.
Yes. SIPs are not contracts with penalties — you can pause, reduce, increase or stop them. That flexibility is the point, and it is also the risk: the main reason SIPs underperform their own projections is that people stop them during the exact market falls that make them work.