What if I raise my SIP every year?

A SIP with a standing instruction to raise the instalment by a set percentage or amount once a year. Registrars also call it a top-up SIP, and it is registered once at the start rather than renegotiated every year.

The reason it exists is that a level instalment quietly shrinks. ₹10,000 a month in 2026 is about ₹4,200 of 2026 purchasing power by 2041 at 6% inflation, so a SIP held flat for fifteen years is a declining commitment even though the number on the mandate never changes.

On the default figures it is the difference between ₹86.84 lakh and ₹50.46 lakh: ₹10,000 a month for fifteen years at 12% a year, with and without a 10% annual increase. That is ₹36.38 lakh more, a gain of about 72% on the level outcome.

It is not free. The stepped version pays in ₹38.13 lakh over the fifteen years against ₹18 lakh for the level one. What the arithmetic shows is that the extra ₹20.13 lakh of contributions buys ₹36.38 lakh of outcome, because the early increases have the most time left to compound.

Whatever your income actually rises by, which for most salaried people in India is somewhere between 8% and 12% a year in the early career and lower later. Setting the step-up to your appraisal rate means your saving rate stays constant rather than falling, which is the point. Setting it above your income growth means the instalment eventually takes a larger share of a salary that did not grow to match, and that is the version people abandon in year six.

Starting larger wins on arithmetic, because money invested earlier compounds longer. ₹20,000 a month held level for fifteen years reaches roughly ₹1.01 crore, more than the ₹86.84 lakh the stepped ₹10,000 reaches, on lower total contributions. The step-up exists because most people cannot start at ₹20,000 and can start at ₹10,000, and a plan you can actually begin beats a better plan you postpone.

₹86.84 lakh in fifteen years at 6% inflation has the purchasing power of about ₹36.23 lakh today. That is still comfortably ahead of the ₹21.05 lakh the level SIP is worth in the same terms, and it is the honest way to compare the two. Tick In today’s money and the whole page, table included, reprices.

Year 13 on the default step-up, against year 11 on the level SIP. The crossover comes later precisely because you keep adding fresh money, and that is not a defect: the stepped plan ends with more of both. The year is printed under the table and moves with your inputs.

Usually you register a fresh mandate with the top-up instruction rather than amending the running one, because most registrars treat the step-up as part of the original registration. The existing SIP can continue alongside it or be stopped. This is an operational question with a different answer at each registrar, and it is worth asking before you set the date.

Press Start from a target instead and the tool solves for the opening instalment, holding your step-up percentage. Because a stepped series has no clean inverse, that answer is found by bisection against the exact forward model rather than by an approximation, so it lands on the target rather than near it. The goal planner asks the same question starting from the target.