XIRR Calculator
Investing & ReturnsMoney-weighted return on dated cash flows.
Annualized return (XIRR): 8.54%
Cash flows & final value
Add each investment (money in) and withdrawal (money out) on the date it happened. Order doesn't matter — they're sorted automatically.
- $
- $
- $
Goal & options
- Capital invested$15,000
- Investment gain$5,000
Return metrics
XIRR is a money-weighted return: it accounts for exactly when every contribution and withdrawal happened, so larger or earlier sums carry more weight. The simple annualized figure treats all your capital as if it were invested on day one — comparing the two shows how much your cash-flow timing helped or hurt.
Goal progress
Your XIRR is 1.46% short of the 10.0% target.
Portfolio value growth
The portfolio value implied by your XIRR: each contribution compounds and each withdrawal is drawn down at the solved rate, landing exactly on your final value. The lower line is the net capital you had deployed at each point.
Cumulative cash flow
Money in versus money out over time. Where the received line overtakes the invested line is your break-even — the point your withdrawals and final value have returned everything you put in.
Cash flow timeline
Every dated cash flow in order — money you invested shown as a negative, money you received as a positive. Bar length reflects each amount's size.
- 2022-01-01-$10,000
- 2023-01-01-$5,000
- 2024-06-01$2,000
- 2026-01-01$18,000
Contributions vs withdrawals
The totals that drive your return: everything you put in, everything you took out along the way, and the value left at the end.
- Invested$15,000
- Withdrawn$2,000
- Final value$18,000
XIRR vs simple return
Your money-weighted XIRR next to the timing-blind simple annualized return. A gap between them is the fingerprint of your cash-flow timing.
- XIRR8.54%
- Simple annualized7.45%
Return breakdown
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| XIRR | 8.54% |
| Total return | 33.33% |
| Simple annualized | 7.45% |
| Total invested | $15,000 |
| Total withdrawn | $2,000 |
| Final value | $18,000 |
| Total received | $20,000 |
| Net gain / loss | $5,000 |
| Beginning value | $10,000 |
| Holding period | 4.00 yrs |
Cash flow schedule
| Date | Type | Amount | Days | Cumulative |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022-01-01 | Invested | -$10,000 | 0 | -$10,000 |
| 2023-01-01 | Invested | -$5,000 | 365 | -$15,000 |
| 2024-06-01 | Withdrew | $2,000 | 882 | -$13,000 |
| 2026-01-01 | Final value | $18,000 | 1461 | $5,000 |
Amounts are signed from your perspective: negative for money invested, positive for money received. The balance history shows the portfolio value implied by your XIRR.
How XIRR is calculated
XIRR has no tidy closed-form solution — it is found by search. Here is what happens under the hood.
- 1
Each cash flow is signed and sorted by date: money you invest is negative, money you receive (including the final value) is positive.
- 2
Every flow is discounted back to the first date using the actual number of days divided by 365, so a flow t years out is worth CF ÷ (1 + r)^t today.
- 3
The calculator searches for the single rate r that makes those discounted flows sum to zero — Newton's method first, falling back to a bracketing bisection if needed.
- 4
That rate is your XIRR: the constant annual return that perfectly reconciles every dated cash flow with your final value.
The XIRR equation
XIRR is the rate r that sets the net present value of every dated cash flow, discounted on an Actual/365 basis from the first date, to zero.
0 = Σ CFᵢ ÷ (1 + r)^((dᵢ − d₀) ÷ 365)where:
- CFᵢ
- the i-th cash flow (negative = invested, positive = received).
- dᵢ
- the date of the i-th cash flow.
- d₀
- the earliest cash-flow date (the base date).
- r
- the annual rate being solved for — your XIRR.
A worked example
Suppose you invest 10,000 at the start of 2022, add 5,000 a year later, take 2,000 back in mid-2024, and the holding is worth 18,000 at the start of 2026. You put in 15,000 of capital and got 20,000 back — a 33.3% total gain. Spread across that real four-year, irregularly-timed schedule it works out to an XIRR of about 8.5% a year. The timing-blind simple annualized return is only 7.5%, because XIRR rewards the capital you got back early and no longer had to keep at risk.
Your figures
Across 3 dated cash flows you invested $15,000 and the holding ends at $18,000 on 2026-01-01. That is a 33.3% total return over 4.0 yrs — an XIRR of 8.54% a year, versus 7.45% a year ignoring the timing of your cash flows.
Inputs explained
- Contribution (invested)
- Money you put into the investment on a given date — a negative cash flow from your pocket's point of view.
- Withdrawal (received)
- Money the investment paid back to you — a dividend, sale or distribution — counted as a positive cash flow.
- Final portfolio value
- What the holding is worth on the valuation date, treated as one last inflow as though you sold everything that day.
- XIRR
- The extended internal rate of return: the single annual rate that reconciles all your dated cash flows, accounting for exactly when each occurred.
- Total return
- The cumulative gain as a percentage of capital invested, with no adjustment for how long the money was at work.
- Simple annualized
- The total return spread evenly over the holding period — a timing-blind benchmark to contrast with XIRR.
Know what this estimate is based on
- Jurisdiction
- General mathematical model
- Scope and limitations
- Scenario model, not a forecast. Returns, volatility, inflation, fees, and taxes are assumptions and actual investment outcomes can be lower or negative.
- Source links checked
- Jul 30, 2026
Built and regression-tested by Smart Tools Lab. It has not been individually reviewed by a licensed financial, tax, or legal professional.
How to use
- 01
List every cash flow on the date it happened: pick a date, enter the amount, and mark it as money you invested or money you withdrew. Add a row for each contribution and each payout — the order doesn't matter, as the calculator sorts them by date for you.
- 02
Enter the final portfolio value and its valuation date — what the holding is worth today, treated as one last inflow as if you sold everything. You need at least one contribution and either a withdrawal or a final value, so there is money going in and money coming back.
- 03
Read your XIRR — the single annualized, money-weighted rate that ties all those dated flows together — alongside the total return, the timing-blind simple annualized return, your net gain, and the implied portfolio value over time.
- 04
Open Goal & options to benchmark your XIRR against a target return, then explore the charts, the yearly and monthly cash-flow summaries, and save scenarios to compare different timing or exit assumptions side by side.
Formula
XIRR is the annual rate r that sets dated net present value to zero: 0 = Σ CFᵢ ÷ (1 + r)^((dᵢ − d₀) ÷ 365) CFᵢ is each signed cash flow and dᵢ is its date. Contributions are negative; withdrawals and the final portfolio value are positive. The engine uses an Actual/365 day count.
Example
Invest 10,000 on 1 January 2025 and receive 11,000 on 1 January 2026, exactly 365 days later. Solving −10,000 + 11,000 ÷ (1 + r) = 0 gives an XIRR of 10%.
Definitions
- XIRR
- The annual money-weighted return on cash flows that occur on irregular dates.
- Actual/365
- A day-count convention that divides the exact days between dates by 365.
- Final value
- The portfolio's value on the valuation date, treated as a terminal positive cash flow.
- Sign convention
- Money invested is negative; money withdrawn or received is positive.
- Convergence
- The solver successfully finding a rate whose residual NPV is sufficiently close to zero.
Good to know
What XIRR actually measures
XIRR stands for the extended internal rate of return, and it answers a deceptively hard question: when money flowed into and out of an investment at irregular dates, what single annual rate of return did you really earn? Most return measures quietly assume the simplest possible story — one lump sum invested on day one and left untouched until the end. Real investing almost never looks like that. You top up an account over the years, take some money out when you need it, perhaps reinvest a windfall, and finally value what is left. XIRR is built precisely for that lumpy reality. It treats every contribution as money leaving your pocket and every withdrawal, dividend or sale as money coming back, then finds the one constant annual rate that makes the timing of all those flows reconcile. Because each amount is weighted by both its size and how long it was actually invested, a large early deposit influences the result far more than a small late one. The figure it produces is directly comparable across wildly different investments — a property held for seven years, a fund drip-fed monthly, a private deal with sporadic capital calls — because it boils every messy schedule down to the same clean unit: a percentage per year. In the default scenario this calculator opens with, 15,000 of contributions and a 2,000 withdrawal end in a holding worth 18,000 after about four years; the XIRR works out to roughly 8.54% a year, the honest annual return on that particular pattern of cash.
How this calculator solves for the rate
There is no neat algebraic formula that spits out XIRR; it has to be found by searching for the rate that satisfies one condition. That condition is that the net present value of every cash flow, discounted back to the earliest date, comes to exactly zero: 0 = Σ CFᵢ ÷ (1 + r)^((dᵢ − d₀) ÷ 365). Each flow is divided by the actual number of calendar days since the first date, scaled by 365 — the Actual/365 day count that spreadsheet XIRR functions also use, leap years and all — so two contributions a few weeks apart are discounted differently from two a year apart. The calculator starts with a sensible guess and applies Newton–Raphson iteration, which uses the slope of the present-value curve to leap quickly toward the rate where it crosses zero, usually converging in a handful of steps. If the cash flows are awkward enough that Newton's method stalls — a flat or ill-behaved slope, or a poor starting point — it falls back to bisection, scanning for two rates that bracket a sign change and then repeatedly halving the gap between them until the rate is pinned down to a very tight tolerance. One elegant property makes the whole thing robust: the answer does not depend on which date you treat as the anchor, because shifting the base date simply rescales the present value by a constant and leaves the zero-crossing untouched. That is why you can list your flows in any order and re-anchor them freely without the XIRR ever changing.
XIRR versus IRR: the role of dates
The plain internal rate of return, IRR, and XIRR are close cousins, and the difference between them is entirely about time. Classic IRR assumes your cash flows arrive at regular, evenly spaced intervals — typically once a year, period one, period two, period three — and it has no concept of an actual calendar. That is fine for a textbook project with tidy annual cash flows, but it quietly distorts reality the moment your flows are uneven: a deposit in January and another in November are treated by IRR as if they were a full period apart, or not, depending only on how you slotted them into periods. XIRR removes that fiction by working with real dates. It measures the precise number of days between each flow and discounts accordingly, so a payment that came eleven months later is weighted as eleven months, not rounded to a whole year. In practice this means IRR and XIRR can disagree meaningfully whenever cash moves at irregular times, and XIRR is almost always the more accurate choice for actual investments, where money rarely respects neat annual boundaries. Think of IRR as XIRR's special case — what you get when every flow happens to fall exactly one year apart. Whenever that assumption is false, which is most of the time in real portfolios, reaching for the dated version is the disciplined thing to do.
XIRR versus CAGR and total return
It is easy to confuse three numbers that all claim to describe 'the return', so it helps to separate them cleanly. Total return is the simplest: the cumulative gain as a fraction of what you put in, with no reference to time at all. In the default plan you invested 15,000 and received 20,000, a total return of 33.3% — a figure that would be identical whether the journey took one year or twenty, which is exactly its weakness. The compound annual growth rate, CAGR, fixes the time problem but only for the simplest case: it assumes a single sum invested at the start and grown untouched to the end, so it cannot cope with deposits or withdrawals along the way. This calculator's 'simple annualized' figure is essentially a CAGR computed as if all your capital had gone in on the first day — 7.45% for the default plan. XIRR is the most complete of the three because it annualizes the return while honouring the actual dates and sizes of every flow. Here XIRR comes out at 8.54%, higher than the simple annualized 7.45%, chiefly because the simple figure assumes all 15,000 was deployed from day one; in reality 5,000 went in a year later and 2,000 came back early, so your capital was at work for less time than that lump-sum picture implies, and the same gain earned over less invested-time means a higher annual rate. The staggered contribution is the bigger reason, with the early withdrawal nudging it up a little further. The lesson is to read these three together: total return tells you how much, CAGR and the simple figure tell you a timing-blind annual rate, and XIRR tells you the timing-aware truth.
Money-weighted versus time-weighted returns
XIRR belongs to a family called money-weighted returns, and understanding its opposite number makes its purpose clear. A money-weighted return lets the size and timing of your cash flows influence the result: if you happened to invest a large sum just before a strong run, your money-weighted return looks great, and if you piled in just before a slump, it looks poor — because more of your money was exposed at the decisive moments. A time-weighted return does the reverse. It deliberately strips out the effect of when you added or removed money, chaining together the percentage gains of each sub-period so that the result reflects only how the underlying investment performed, regardless of your contribution decisions. That distinction matters because the two answer different questions. If you want to judge a fund manager who cannot control when you deposit, the time-weighted return is fair to them. If you want to know what you actually earned on your own pattern of investing — rewarding or penalising your own timing — the money-weighted XIRR is the honest measure. For an individual tracking a personal portfolio with their own irregular top-ups and withdrawals, XIRR is almost always the right lens, because it captures the real outcome of the real decisions you made, not a hypothetical buy-and-hold you never followed.
Why irregular cash flows demand XIRR
The whole reason XIRR exists is that interesting investments are rarely tidy. Consider a few common shapes. A dollar-cost-averaging investor adds a fixed amount every month for a decade, then checks the value — dozens of contributions, each invested for a different length of time, with no single 'start' that a basic return formula could use. A property buyer puts down a deposit, pays stamp duty and fees, collects rent and incurs costs for years, then sells net of agent fees — inflows and outflows of different signs scattered across an irregular calendar. A private-equity investor faces capital calls whenever the fund needs money and receives distributions whenever it exits a deal, an utterly unpredictable rhythm. In every one of these cases, asking 'what was my annual return?' is meaningless without a method that respects when each pound or dollar moved, and that method is XIRR. It collapses an arbitrary stream of dated, signed amounts into one comparable annual rate, which is why it has become the standard tool for measuring real portfolios, rental properties, alternative investments and any savings plan with ongoing contributions. The practical takeaway is simple: the more irregular your cash flows, the less any single-number shortcut can be trusted, and the more you need a dated, money-weighted calculation to tell you the truth about your performance.
Reading the implied balance and the break-even point
Two of this calculator's charts turn the abstract rate into something you can see. The portfolio-value line shows the balance your XIRR implies at each point in time: starting from your first contribution, the model grows the balance at the solved rate between flows, adds each new contribution, subtracts each withdrawal, and — by the mathematics of how XIRR is defined — lands exactly on the final value you entered. Watching that line is a good sanity check; if the implied path looks wildly unlike how the investment really behaved, your inputs may be telling a different story than you intended. The cumulative cash-flow chart tells a complementary story by plotting two climbing lines: the total you have invested so far and the total you have received so far. Early on the invested line sits far above the received line — you are out of pocket — and the moment the received line crosses above it is your break-even, the point at which withdrawals and the final value have returned everything you put in. The gap between the two lines at the end is your net gain or loss in plain cash terms. Together these views translate a single percentage into an intuitive picture of capital going to work and then coming home, which is often more persuasive than the headline rate alone, especially when you are explaining a result to someone who does not live in spreadsheets.
When XIRR is undefined or has more than one answer
XIRR is powerful but not magic, and it has two well-known limitations worth understanding before you trust a number. First, it only exists when your cash flows change direction at least once: there must be money going in and money coming back, at least one negative and one positive flow. A list of pure contributions with no withdrawal or final value has no rate of return to solve for — there is simply no payoff to measure against the outlay — and the calculator will ask you to add one. Second, and more subtly, cash flows that switch sign several times can admit more than one mathematically valid rate. This follows from the same rule of signs that governs polynomial roots: a stream that goes out, comes back, goes out again and returns can, in principle, be satisfied by two or more different rates, none of them obviously 'the' answer. Such patterns are unusual in ordinary investing — they tend to appear in projects with large interim outflows — but when they occur the calculator flags the multiple sign changes and reports the rate its solver converges to — from a realistic starting guess that lands on the economically plausible root for ordinary cash flows — rather than asserting the result is necessarily unique. The practical guidance is to treat a multiple-sign-change warning as a prompt to think, not a verdict: check that your flows are entered correctly, and remember that for genuinely ambiguous projects no single rate may fully capture the economics.
Common mistakes that distort an XIRR
Because XIRR is sensitive to dates and signs, small input errors can produce confidently wrong answers, and a handful of mistakes account for most of them. The most common is getting a sign wrong — entering a withdrawal as a contribution or vice versa — which can flip a respectable return into a nonsensical one; always confirm that money you put in is marked as invested and money you received is marked as withdrawn. The second is forgetting the final value: if you have not sold, the current worth of the holding must be entered as a final inflow on today's date, or the calculator is measuring only the cash you happened to take out and will badly understate your return. A third is mismatched or wrong dates, since XIRR keys entirely off the calendar; a contribution dated a year early or late will quietly skew the rate. A fourth is over-reading a very short window: an investment held for only a few weeks can produce a huge annualized XIRR simply because a modest gain is being projected over a tiny fraction of a year, which is why this calculator flags implausibly extreme results as a sanity check rather than a forecast. Finally, people sometimes compare an XIRR against a benchmark computed a different way — a time-weighted fund return, say — and conclude they have beaten or lagged it when they are really comparing two different measures. Enter clean signs and accurate dates, include the ending value, and compare like with like, and XIRR will reward you with a genuinely trustworthy number.
Putting your XIRR to work
A reliable XIRR is most useful when you do something with it, and the discipline around it matters as much as the figure itself. Use it first as a yardstick: an annual rate is directly comparable, so you can line up a rental property, an index fund and a side investment on equal footing in a way total return never allows, and you can hold each against a meaningful benchmark such as a low-cost market return or your own required rate. Set a target in the Goal & options panel and the calculator will tell you at a glance whether your real, timing-aware return is clearing the bar you care about. Use the scenario tool to ask 'what if' questions — what an earlier exit, a larger top-up, or a delayed sale would have done to the rate — and save them side by side, because seeing how sensitive your XIRR is to timing is often more instructive than the headline itself. Keep your expectations grounded: XIRR measures the past with precision, but a strong historical rate is a record, not a promise, and a rate inflated by a lucky short holding period should be read with caution. Above all, judge investments on their money-weighted, after-cost reality rather than on the flattering total-return numbers that marketing tends to quote. Used this way, XIRR stops being an obscure spreadsheet function and becomes what it should be: the clearest single answer to the most important question an investor can ask, which is simply how well their own money actually did.
Frequently asked questions
What is XIRR and when should I use it?
XIRR — the extended internal rate of return — is the single annual rate of return that accounts for the exact dates of every cash flow into and out of an investment. Use it whenever your money went in and came out at irregular intervals rather than as one clean lump sum: topping up an investment account over the years, a property bought and sold with costs along the way, private-equity drawdowns and distributions, or any portfolio with mid-stream deposits and withdrawals. Because it weights each pound or dollar by how long it was actually invested, XIRR is the fairest way to judge the return on a real-world, lumpy stream of cash flows.
Why is my XIRR different from the total return shown?
They answer different questions. The total return is cumulative and ignores time: in the default plan you put in 15,000 and got 20,000 back, a 33.3% total gain, whether that took one year or twenty. XIRR turns that into an annual rate while accounting for when each flow happened — about 8.54% a year over the roughly four-year horizon. A big-looking total return spread over many years is often a modest annual one, which is exactly why annualizing with XIRR matters before you compare one investment with another.
How is XIRR different from CAGR or a simple annualized return?
CAGR and a simple annualized return assume a single amount invested on day one and left untouched until the end — they have no way to handle deposits or withdrawals in between. The default plan's simple annualized figure is 7.45%, computed as if all 15,000 had been invested at the start. XIRR is higher here, about 8.54%, mainly because the simple figure pretends all 15,000 was invested for the full four years, whereas 5,000 of it went in only a year after the start and 2,000 came back early — so the average dollar was actually at work for less time, and the same gain earned over less invested-time means a higher annual rate. The later contribution is the bigger effect; the early withdrawal nudges it up a little more. When there is only one contribution and one final value, XIRR and the simple annualized return are identical; the gap between them grows with the irregularity of your cash flows.
Is XIRR the same as a money-weighted return?
Yes. 'Money-weighted return' and XIRR are two names for the same idea: a return that weights each cash flow by its size and how long it was invested, so larger and earlier amounts influence the result more. It is the counterpart to a time-weighted return, which strips out the effect of deposit and withdrawal timing to judge a fund manager's skill. For measuring what you personally earned on your own pattern of investing, the money-weighted XIRR is the number you want.
What does it mean if the calculator can't find an XIRR?
XIRR only exists when your cash flows change direction at least once — some money going in (negative) and some coming back (positive). If every entry is a contribution with no withdrawal or final value, there is no return to solve for, and the calculator asks you to add one. Very unusual in-and-out patterns can also change sign several times, which means more than one rate could mathematically satisfy them; the calculator flags this and reports the rate its solver converges to, which is the economically plausible one for ordinary cash flows. If it reports that the flows don't resolve to a single rate, re-check the signs and dates of your entries.
What day-count convention does this calculator use?
It discounts every cash flow on an Actual/365 basis from the earliest date — the same convention spreadsheet XIRR functions use — so the exact calendar gap between dates drives the result, leap years included. The rate is found by Newton's method, with a bracketing bisection fallback for awkward cash flows, and is solved to a very tight tolerance. Because the answer is invariant to which date you treat as the starting point, reordering or re-anchoring your flows never changes the XIRR.