Nifty 50 Returns Calculator
Real Nifty 50 history: what a lumpsum or SIP between two years actually did.
Pick a window with at least two trading days and an amount above zero.
Uses Nifty 50's daily closes from 2007-09-17 to 2026-08-21. A lumpsum buys at the first close on or after 1 January of the start year; a SIP buys on the same day each month. Price index only — dividends, fund costs and tax are not included, so an index fund tracking it would differ slightly.
Independent · No commissions · No fund-house data — how the numbers are computed
How it works
Every other projection on this site assumes a return. This one does not: it takes the Nifty 50's actual daily closes — the same series the fund pages use for alpha, beta and the other benchmark ratios — and shows what a lumpsum on 1 January of a start year, or a monthly SIP from then on, was worth at the end of an end year. Invested, value, CAGR for a lumpsum or XIRR for a SIP, and the return of every calendar year in the window.
It is a price index, so the figures are the level of the index and nothing else: no dividends (the Nifty 50's yield has run around 1–1.5% a year, which a total-return index would add), no fund expenses, and no tax. An index fund tracking the Nifty 50 would have returned a little less than the price index plus dividends, by roughly its expense ratio and tracking error.
The value of real history is the years that were not average. The window you choose determines everything — start at the top of 2007 and the early years are brutal; start in 2009 and they are spectacular — which is the point: the calendar-year table shows how uneven the path was even when the multi-year CAGR looks smooth. The coverage runs from the earliest close in the stored series, which begins in 2007.
Frequently asked questions
Where does the Nifty 50 data come from?
From the index's daily closing levels, stored in the site's benchmark history and refreshed by the background worker each day — the same series used to compute every fund's alpha, beta and capture ratios. It is the price index, not the total-return index, so dividends are excluded from every figure shown.
Why does the result not match my index fund's return?
Three reasons. The index fund receives and reinvests dividends, which the price index ignores (roughly 1–1.5% a year in the Nifty 50's case). The fund deducts its expense ratio and carries some tracking error. And a real SIP buys at the NAV of its transaction date, which need not be the first trading day of the month this calculator uses.
What is the difference between CAGR and XIRR here?
A lumpsum has one cash flow in and one out, so its annualized return is a compound annual growth rate. A SIP has many inflows on different dates, each invested for a different length of time, so a single CAGR does not exist; XIRR solves for the one annual rate that discounts every installment and the final value to zero. Both are annualized percentages and are comparable with each other.
Can I start the window before 2007?
Not on this page. The Nifty 50 was launched in 1996, but the daily series the site holds begins in September 2007, and the calculator only reports on closes it actually has. Longer-run figures quoted elsewhere, such as a 1996-to-date CAGR, are computed from annual levels rather than daily ones.
Go further
What tracking the Nifty 50 costs and how closely funds manage it.
The same backtest against an actual fund's NAV history instead of the index.
The annualized-return arithmetic between any two values.
Why the window you pick changes the answer so much.