Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) Calculator

CAGR = (Ending Value ÷ Beginning Value)^(1/Years) - 1. This formula smooths out year-to-year volatility to show the consistent annual rate that would produce the same total growth. It's the standard way to express growth rates for any time series.

This calculator uses 3 inputs — enough to capture the meaningful drivers of the answer without overwhelming the user. Expect the result to be defensible for most planning and screening contexts; for material decisions, run sensitivity on the discount rate or growth rate to bracket the realistic range of outcomes.

Growth tools normalize multi-period results into comparable rates. Compound annual growth rate is the standard expression for any time series — investment returns, revenue trajectories, market sizes — because it removes the distortion caused by comparing different time horizons.

For live macroeconomic context that flows into many of these calculations — current Treasury yields and the federal funds rate when discounting cash flows, prevailing inflation when projecting revenue, current wage benchmarks when modeling labor cost — pair the result with the live readings on the indicators dashboard. Authoritative free sources for those inputs include the Federal Reserve’s FRED database for rates and macro series, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for wage and inflation data, and SEC EDGAR for public-company financial disclosures.

Use CAGR to compare growth rates across different time periods, evaluate whether a company is accelerating or decelerating, benchmark against competitors, and set growth targets. It's the language of boardrooms and investor presentations.

For deeper conceptual background on the inputs and outputs, see the learn library; for the editorial standards behind this page, including how the formula was selected and how the calculator is maintained, see the methodology page; for the full list of available calculators, see the calculators index.