XIRR calculator: how to enter your cash flows

What the XIRR calculator is for

Once money has gone in more than once, or come out part-way, a simple return stops making sense. ₹1.5 lakh that became ₹1.8 lakh is a 20% gain, but 20% over what period, when half the money arrived six months after the rest? XIRR answers that with one annual rate that accounts for the date of every rupee.

The XIRR calculator takes a list of dated amounts and returns that rate. If you prefer working in Excel or Google Sheets, calculating a SIP's XIRR in a spreadsheet covers the =XIRR() route. This post is about the calculator page and the mistakes it makes easy to see.

How the page is laid out

Each row has a Date and an Amount (₹). The instruction above the rows is the rule that matters: "negative for money out, positive for money back."

• + Add cash flow adds a new row dated today with an amount of zero.
• The ✕ beside a row removes it. You cannot go below two rows.
• On a phone, which has no minus key on its number pad, a −/+ button beside the amount flips the sign.
• Rows with an amount of zero are ignored, so a blank new row does not change the answer.

There is one result card, XIRR, shown with a sign, such as "+6.64%". If the rows do not contain at least one negative and one positive amount, the card shows a dash and a note explains why. The rows do not need to be in date order.

Reading the demo rows

The page opens with three rows filled in:

The XIRR card shows +6.64%. The plain gain is ₹30,000 on ₹1,50,000, or 20%, over three years. To see why the answer is 6.64%, change the dates. If all ₹1,50,000 had gone in on 15 January 2023, the XIRR would be 6.26%. If all of it had gone in on 15 July 2023, it would be 7.55%. The real answer lies between the two, because two-thirds of the money was invested for the full three years and one-third for two and a half.

A worked example with a redemption

Here is a more typical history. Three purchases, one partial redemption, and the holding still open on 15 October 2026:

The calculator shows +11.27%. In total, ₹4,50,000 went in and ₹6,40,000 came back or is still there, a gain of ₹1,90,000. The ₹1,20,000 redemption counts as money returned on its own date. The last row is not money you have received, but the calculation has to close the position somewhere, and today's value is the honest closing figure.

Three mistakes the calculator makes visible

1. Leaving out the current value. Delete the last row of the example and the XIRR becomes -57.42%. The calculator now thinks you put in ₹4,50,000 and only ever got ₹1,20,000 back. Any open holding needs its current value as a final positive row.

2. A redemption entered with the wrong sign. Enter the ₹1,20,000 redemption as -1,20,000 and the XIRR becomes -2.86%. You have told the calculator you invested another ₹1,20,000 instead of taking it out. A redemption, a dividend paid out to you and the current value are always positive.

3. Annualising a short period. ₹1,00,000 on 15 September 2026 that is worth ₹1,03,000 on 15 October 2026 shows an XIRR of +43.32%. The 3% gain is real; the 43% is that gain assumed to repeat for a full year. Over periods well under a year, read the plain gain instead.

How the rate is found

XIRR has no formula you can solve by hand. The calculator discounts every cash flow by the time since the first one, then searches for the single annual rate at which the discounted amounts add up to zero. It tries Newton's method first and falls back to bisection if that does not settle. With a normal pattern, money in first and money out later, there is one answer. A history whose signs switch back and forth several times can have more than one mathematical solution, and the calculator reports the one it finds.

Two related measures sit on separate pages. With exactly one investment and one final value, XIRR equals CAGR, which the CAGR calculator handles. And absolute return, CAGR and XIRR explains when each one applies.

What the calculator does not do

It does not look up NAVs or build the cash flows for you. You type every row, which makes it suitable for anything: a fund, a stock, a gold purchase, a loan to a relative. For a SIP in a specific fund, the MF calculator replays the instalments against the fund's real NAV history and reports the XIRR without manual entry.

It also says nothing about why the number is what it is. A SIP's XIRR can differ sharply from the fund's own published return over the same years, and why your SIP return differs from the fund's return explains the timing effect behind it. For how wide that range was across real start dates, see ten-year Nifty 50 SIPs for every start month.

Before you trust the number

Check three things on the XIRR calculator: every purchase is negative, every receipt and the current value are positive, and the dates are the transaction dates on your statement rather than the dates you meant to invest. The XIRR glossary entry has the one-paragraph definition. None of this is a view on whether any investment is worth holding.