Guide
If your investments went in at different times in different amounts, only one return number is honest: XIRR.
Absolute return — total money out divided by total money in — ignores timing entirely. It treats a rupee invested ten years ago the same as one invested last month, which is obviously wrong: the older rupee had far longer to compound.
CAGR fixes timing but assumes a single investment and a single withdrawal. Real SIPs have dozens of cashflows on different dates, so CAGR doesn't fit either.
XIRR — extended internal rate of return — finds the single annualised rate that makes all your dated cashflows balance to zero in present-value terms. It correctly weights each instalment by how long it was actually invested.
For a real SIP with skipped months, top-ups and partial withdrawals, XIRR is the only metric that tells you the true annualised return on the money as you actually invested it.
Compare it to the return assumption you used when planning. If you assumed 12% but your XIRR is 9%, the gap is your timing and fund-selection reality versus the projection.
Our XIRR calculator lets you enter your real, irregular schedule — including the messy bits — and returns the honest annualised figure, something a basic SIP calculator structurally can't.
Try the tools