Education prices have not risen at the general rate of inflation, and planning as though they did is how a fund ends up short in the year it is needed. This uses a separate education inflation assumption and shows what it does.
Assumptions last reviewed 20 August 2026
To reach ₹1.04 Cr in 15 years at 12% a year, you would need to set aside ₹20,697 a month.
The band spans 10% to 13% a year. A single line at this horizon would be false precision.
Starting twelve months from now instead of today would raise the amount needed by ₹3,232 a month.
Solved from your target
Past performance may or may not be sustained in future and is not a guarantee of any future returns. The rate is capped at 13% p.a., being the mean of 10-year rolling returns of the Nifty 50 between 1 June 2013 and 30 May 2023 (12.93%), the basis AMFI prescribes for illustrations.
| Year | Paid in this year | Growth this year | Total paid in | Value | In today’s money |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| today | ₹0 | ₹0 | ₹0 | ₹0 | ₹0 |
| 5 | ₹2.48 L | ₹1.79 L | ₹12.42 L | ₹17.07 L | ₹10.60 L |
| 10 | ₹2.48 L | ₹5.28 L | ₹24.84 L | ₹48.09 L | ₹18.54 L |
| 15 | ₹2.48 L | ₹11.62 L | ₹37.25 L | ₹1.04 Cr | ₹25.00 L |
Growth overtakes the money you paid in during year 11. From that point on, most of what you hold is something you did not pay for.
Many Indian return calculators let you type 20%, and some go to 30%. This one stops at 13%, which is roughly what the market has actually delivered over a decade.
Mean of every 10-year rolling return between 1 June 2013 and 30 May 2023. Source: AMFI Best Practices Guidelines Circular 109/2023-24 of 1 November 2023, which sets these as the rates a mutual fund illustration in India may use. Nifty 50 at 12.93% is the highest of them, which is where the 13% ceiling comes from.
Your settings above, ₹20,697 a month for 15 years, at three different assumptions.
The gap between those figures is not a return. It is an assumption.
12.93% is the average of every ten-year stretch in that period. Some stretches were better and several were a great deal worse, and you get one of them rather than the average of all of them. So a calculator set to 20% is not being optimistic. It is quietly moving the goalposts, because a higher assumed rate makes the monthly amount you need look smaller than it is. That is the one error in this arithmetic that costs you money, and it only shows up twenty years later, when the corpus is short.
AMFI sets this ceiling for every mutual fund illustration in India. It is also the number we would have picked.
The cost you name is grown at the education inflation rate to the year the fees fall due, and the annuity is then solved backwards for the monthly contribution that reaches it. Two compounding steps, and the first one is where this page differs from a general goal planner.
The inflation field defaults to 10% rather than the 6% used elsewhere on this site. That is a planning assumption for Indian private higher education rather than a measured index: there is no official education-only CPI series published at the granularity a family needs, and fee increases at private institutions have run well ahead of headline inflation for years. Change it if you have better information about the specific institution.
For study abroad the rate is not the whole story, because the rupee cost also moves with the exchange rate. A course priced in dollars carries a currency risk this page does not model.
The education inflation figure is an assumption, not a statistic, and it is doing most of the work. At 10% a ₹25 lakh course costs ₹1.04 crore in fifteen years; at 6% it costs ₹59.91 lakh. Nothing else on this page moves the answer that far, so treat it as the number to stress-test rather than the one to accept.
It assumes a single lump of cost in a single year. A degree is normally paid across three or four years, which is slightly kinder than this models, because the later instalments keep compounding while the first ones are being spent.
It ignores scholarships, an education loan, and the possibility that your child chooses something cheaper or more expensive than you planned for. It also ignores tax on redemption.
And it cannot tell you what to hold. A fund needed in three years and one needed in fifteen are different problems, and no scheme is named anywhere on this page.
A course costing ₹25 lakh today is ₹1.04 crore in fifteen years at 10% education inflation. At the 6% general rate most calculators use, the same course would come to ₹59.91 lakh.
That gap of roughly ₹44 lakh is the entire argument for this page existing separately from the goal planner. A family that planned on the lower number has funded a bit over half the fee and will find out in the year the offer letter arrives.
₹20,697 a month for fifteen years at an assumed 12% return, against the ₹1.04 crore target. Leave it five years later and the same ₹1.04 crore, still needed on the same date, takes ₹44,948 a month, because you have lost the years with the most compounding left in them. The line under the result shows what a single year of delay costs on your own figures.
Because education is a service delivered by people, and the dominant cost is salaries rather than goods. Services inflation runs ahead of the headline basket almost everywhere, and Indian private institutions have also been raising real fees as demand for a limited number of places has grown. The headline Consumer Price Index weights food and fuel heavily and describes a basket a family paying college fees is not buying.
Higher, and with a second variable. Tuition abroad has generally risen more slowly than Indian private fees in local-currency terms, but the rupee cost also moves with the exchange rate, and the rupee has depreciated against the dollar over most long periods. A reasonable approach is to plan in the foreign currency, then apply your own view on the exchange rate, rather than folding both into one inflation number. This page does not model currency at all.
The label on the product is not the thing that matters; the horizon and the cost are. A plan marketed for children is not, by virtue of the name, better suited to a fifteen-year goal than any other vehicle with the same underlying assets and a lower cost. What actually matters is that the money is invested for growth while the horizon is long, and moved out of growth assets as the fee date approaches. That second half is the part most families forget.
Well before you need it. A fee due in eighteen months should not be sitting in equity, because a bad year at that point cannot be waited out: the date is fixed by an admission cycle rather than by you. A common approach is to begin shifting three to five years out and to be substantially out of growth assets by the final year. What that looks like for your own holdings is worth a conversation.
It is a reasonable part of the answer rather than an alternative to saving. Education loan interest is deductible without a ceiling under the old regime, now Section 129 of the Income-tax Act 2025 and formerly Section 80E, which lowers its effective cost for a family in the old regime. But a loan transfers the cost to a child starting their career, and the deduction is worth nothing to somebody in the new regime. Fund what you can and borrow the balance, rather than treating either as the whole plan.
Then the honest levers are the same three as on any goal: contribute more, lower the target, or accept a shortfall and plan to bridge it with a loan. Raising the assumed return is the fourth and it does nothing except move the shortfall further out. If the monthly figure is not affordable, the useful step is to size the gap now, while there is still time to do something about it.
10% is the working assumption on this page for Indian private higher education. There is no official education-only index at the granularity a family needs, so treat it as a planning figure rather than a measured statistic, and use the actual fee history of the institution you have in mind if you can get it.
It varies enormously by institution and by whether the seat is government or private, which is why this page takes the figure from you rather than assuming one. Start from the current published fee of the kind of institution you have in mind, including hostel and living costs, and let the page inflate it.
Yes, and for a practical reason rather than a tidiness one: the horizons differ, so the sensible asset mix differs, and a single pot forces both goals into the wrong answer. Keeping them separate also stops the education fee quietly being paid out of the retirement corpus.
It is a scheme designed for exactly that purpose, with a fixed rate and a lock-in that runs to age 21. Whether its rate keeps pace with education inflation over the period is the question worth asking, and the answer depends on both. The Sukanya Samriddhi calculator models it directly.
No. It treats the cost as a single amount needed in a single year, which is slightly conservative: paying across four years leaves the later instalments compounding for longer. If you want to be precise, run the page once per year of the course.
AMFI Best Practices Guidelines Circular 109/2023-24 caps the return used in any mutual fund illustration at 13%. It matters here because a higher assumed return makes the monthly figure look smaller, and on an education goal the date the money is needed cannot be postponed.
Talk to the desk
The useful conversation is not the arithmetic, it is which institution you have in mind, how firm the date is, and when the money should stop being invested for growth. Bring the figures and we will start from those.
Calculator outputs are indicative projections on assumptions you select, not assurances, and not a projection of the performance of any scheme.
