One amount, left alone, compounding. This shows where it lands, how much of that is growth rather than your own money, and what it is actually worth once inflation has taken its share.
Assumptions last reviewed 20 August 2026
₹5,00,000 left alone for 10 years at 12% a year reaches ₹16.50 L, of which ₹11.50 L is growth.
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 cost you ₹1.86 L at the end.
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 | ₹5.00 L | ₹5.00 L | ₹5.00 L |
| 5 | ₹0 | ₹1.02 L | ₹5.00 L | ₹9.08 L | ₹6.79 L |
| 10 | ₹0 | ₹1.86 L | ₹5.00 L | ₹16.50 L | ₹9.21 L |
Growth overtakes the money you paid in during year 6. 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, ₹10,000 a month for 10 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.
Compound interest, credited monthly: FV = P × (1 + r/12)^(12n), where P is the amount you invest, r is the annual rate as a decimal and n is the number of years. Nothing is added along the way, so every rupee of the outcome above P is growth.
Compounding monthly rather than annually is the convention Indian platforms use for a market-linked projection, and it is a small difference: ₹5 lakh at 12% for ten years reaches ₹16.50 lakh compounded monthly against ₹15.53 lakh compounded once a year.
Solving backwards is the same relationship divided rather than multiplied, so the deposit needed for a target is exact rather than approximated. The today’s-money view divides each year’s balance by inflation compounded to that year.
A lumpsum carries timing risk a SIP does not. All of the money goes in on one day at one price, so the outcome depends on what that day happened to be in a way a monthly instalment averages out. A constant rate hides exactly that risk, and it is the most important thing this page cannot show you.
It applies one rate to every month for the whole horizon. Real sequences have bad decades, and a bad one at the start of a lumpsum is materially worse than a bad one at the end.
It ignores exit load, capital gains tax on redemption, and the possibility that you withdraw part of it. It also assumes you leave it alone, which is the assumption most likely to break with money that arrived unexpectedly.
And it cannot tell you where to put it. No scheme is named anywhere on this page, and the rate is an assumption you choose rather than one attached to any fund.
A single investment made at one time, rather than a monthly instalment. In practice it is what happens to a bonus, a maturing deposit, the proceeds of a property sale, gratuity or an inheritance: money that has already arrived and now has to go somewhere.
The instrument does not change anything. A lumpsum can go into an equity fund, a debt fund, a deposit or a bond, and the rate you assume on this page should describe whichever of those you actually mean.
Worked through on the default figures: ₹5,00,000 at 12% a year for ten years, compounded monthly. The monthly rate is 0.01, the number of months is 120, and (1.01) raised to 120 is 3.3004. Multiply by ₹5,00,000 and you get ₹16.50 lakh.
Of that, ₹5 lakh is your own money and ₹11.50 lakh is growth. The money has multiplied 3.3 times in nominal terms, and the year-by- year table underneath shows exactly where each year’s increment came from.
Press Start from a target instead and this runs the other way. To reach ₹1 crore in ten years at 12% a year you would need to put in ₹30.30 lakh today. The same target over twenty years needs ₹9.18 lakh, which is the clearest single illustration of what an extra decade is worth: under a third of the money for the same result.
On historical averages, investing a lumpsum immediately has beaten spreading it out over most periods, because markets rise more often than they fall and money in earlier compounds longer. That is the arithmetic answer and it is the one most studies land on.
The arithmetic is not the whole question. A lumpsum put in a month before a 30% fall is a real outcome that a spreadsheet treats as a probability and a person experiences as a decision they made. If the size of the amount would keep you awake, spreading it over six or twelve months costs a little expected return and buys something worth having.
₹16.50 lakh in ten years, at 6% inflation, has the purchasing power of about ₹9.21 lakh today. The money has still nearly doubled in real terms, which is the honest way to state the result: not 3.3 times, but 1.8 times what it can actually buy. Tick In today’s money and every figure on the page reprices.
The one that describes the instrument you actually intend to use. AMFI publishes a fixed-income basis of 7.20% on the ten-year G-Sec, a balanced 50/50 basis of about 10%, and an equity basis of 12.93% on the Nifty 50, all measured as the mean of ten-year rolling returns between 1 June 2013 and 30 May 2023. For a horizon under three years, the equity number is the wrong one regardless of what the fund has done recently.
If the money is already in your account, holding it in a savings account to feed a SIP is a decision to earn about 3% on the undeployed balance while waiting. Over twelve months on a large amount that cost is real and it is rarely counted. A middle course some people take is to place the money in a liquid fund and move it across in instalments, which at least earns something while the averaging happens.
On the default figures, deferring a ₹5 lakh investment by twelve months gives up ₹1.86 lakh at the end of the ten years. That is more than a third of the original amount, given up for a year of indecision, and the line under the result recomputes it on whatever numbers you enter.
Most schemes accept ₹1,000 or ₹5,000 as a one-time investment, and the exact minimum is set by each scheme rather than by regulation. It is generally higher than the SIP minimum but still low enough that the minimum is rarely the constraint.
It carries the same market risk as any other way of buying the same fund, plus timing risk that a monthly instalment averages away. The risk is in the instrument and in the entry date, not in the fact that the money arrived all at once.
For an equity fund, gains on units held more than a year are taxed at 12.5% above ₹1.25 lakh of gains in a financial year, and gains on units held less than a year at 20%. Debt funds bought on or after 1 April 2023 are taxed at your slab rate whatever the holding period. The capital gains calculator handles this separately.
From an open-ended fund, yes, subject to any exit load in the first year and to the tax above. Equity Linked Savings Schemes lock each investment for three years, and close-ended funds cannot be redeemed before maturity at all.
A little, and it is worth knowing which one you are looking at. ₹5 lakh at 12% for ten years is ₹16.50 lakh compounded monthly and ₹15.53 lakh compounded annually. This page compounds monthly, which is the convention Indian platforms use.
AMFI Best Practices Guidelines Circular 109/2023-24 caps the return used in any mutual fund illustration at 13%, being the mean of ten-year rolling Nifty 50 returns between 1 June 2013 and 30 May 2023. The block under the calculator shows what a higher assumption would have shown.
Talk to the desk
A lumpsum is the one case where the entry date matters and where the amount is usually large enough that the choice of category matters more than the choice of rate. Bring the figure and the horizon, 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.
