“What was my return?” has more than one right answer depending on whether you added money along the way, whether you’re comparing a steady average to actual compounded growth, or whether you’re trying to combine several accounts into one number. This portfolio return calculator covers all of it: CAGR for a clean start-to-end growth rate, XIRR for money-weighted returns with deposits and withdrawals, Arithmetic vs Geometric mean comparison, a weighted Portfolio Blend across multiple holdings, and a combined Portfolio XIRR across your entire portfolio at once.

How to use this portfolio return calculator

1. Select your Currency from the dropdown, or add a custom currency.
2. Choose a tab: CAGR, XIRR, Arithmetic vs Geometric, Portfolio Blend, or Portfolio XIRR.
3. CAGR: enter a Starting value, Ending value, and Number of years, then calculate.
4. XIRR: enter a Starting value with its date and an Ending value with its date, then add any Deposits & Withdrawals that occurred in between, each as its own dated row.
5. Arithmetic vs Geometric: add each period’s return percentage as its own row, then calculate to compare both mean types.
6. Portfolio Blend: add each holding with its name, starting value (used as its weight), and return percentage (which can be a holding’s own already-computed CAGR).
7. Portfolio XIRR: add each holding/account, expanding it to enter its own starting value + date, ending value + date, and any deposits/withdrawals for that specific holding.
8. Review your results: hero value, supporting stats, charts, and detailed breakdown tables.
9. Export your results as PDF, Excel, or PNG, and check View History for past calculations across any tab.

What this portfolio return calculator does

Rather than forcing every kind of return question into one formula, this calculator offers five distinct calculations, each suited to a different situation: a simple two-point growth rate (CAGR), a return that accounts for money added or withdrawn partway through (XIRR), a comparison of two ways of averaging returns across periods, a blended return across multiple holdings weighted by size, and a combined XIRR across an entire multi-account portfolio. Picking the right tab for your actual situation matters, since these methods can produce meaningfully different numbers from the same underlying data.

CAGR: the smoothed annual growth rate

CAGR answers a specific question: what single, steady annual rate would take your starting value to your ending value over the given number of years? It smooths out any volatility or unevenness in the actual path between those two points into one clean number, which is exactly why it can differ from a simple average of year-by-year returns, a distinction the Arithmetic vs Geometric tab explores directly. CAGR is the right tool when you know a clean starting and ending value with no deposits or withdrawals in between.

XIRR: money-weighted return with deposits and withdrawals

Real investment accounts rarely have just a starting and ending value, money gets added or withdrawn along the way, and each of those cash flows happened on a specific date. XIRR (Extended Internal Rate of Return) solves for the single annual rate that reconciles every dated cash flow, your starting value, ending value, and every deposit or withdrawal in between, into one consistent money-weighted return figure.

Because this equation can’t be solved algebraically, the calculator finds r numerically through bisection, narrowing in on the rate that makes the equation balance. If your entered balances and transactions are inconsistent, for example, if no sign change is possible across the cash flow series, meaning a valid rate genuinely can’t reconcile your numbers, the calculator reports this explicitly rather than displaying an incorrect result, since a wrong number would be worse than no number at all.

Arithmetic vs Geometric mean: why they’re not the same

Enter a series of period returns, and this tab calculates both the simple Arithmetic Mean (just averaging the percentages) and the Geometric Mean (which accounts for compounding across periods).

The geometric mean is always equal to or lower than the arithmetic mean whenever returns vary period to period, and it’s the more accurate measure of your actual realized growth over multiple periods. A classic illustration: a portfolio that gains 50% one year and loses 50% the next has an arithmetic mean of 0%, suggesting no net change, but the actual compounded result is a 25% loss, which the geometric mean correctly reflects. This gap grows with return volatility, which is exactly why this tab exists as a direct side-by-side comparison rather than reporting only one figure.

Portfolio Blend: a value-weighted return across holdings

If you hold several investments and want one combined return figure, Portfolio Blend weights each holding’s return by its starting value, so a larger holding’s return contributes more to the combined figure than a smaller one’s, which better reflects your actual overall portfolio performance than a plain average would.

The calculator also reports the plain Unweighted Arithmetic Mean alongside the weighted figure, so you can see directly how much weighting by size changes the result, useful when one large holding’s performance is pulling the blended return in a different direction than a simple average across all holdings would suggest. It’s worth noting this is a value-weighted average of the return percentages you enter, not a full recalculation from each holding’s underlying transaction history, if you have detailed transactions for each holding, Portfolio XIRR is the more precise tool.

Portfolio XIRR: combining multiple accounts into one rate

This is the most complete mode: add each holding or account, each with its own starting value and date, ending value and date, and any deposits or withdrawals specific to that holding. The calculator combines every holding’s cash flows into a single dated list, sorted chronologically across all holdings together, and solves one combined Portfolio XIRR from that unified cash flow series. It also reports each holding’s own individually-solved XIRR alongside the combined figure, so you can see both your overall portfolio return and how each individual account contributed to it.

Choosing the right tab for your situation

A note on accuracy

All figures here are theoretical calculations based on the amounts, dates, and returns you enter, actual investment returns vary and are never guaranteed. XIRR and Portfolio XIRR solve a money-weighted rate numerically; if your entered data is genuinely inconsistent, the calculator reports that no solution could be found rather than showing an incorrect number. Portfolio Blend is a value-weighted average of return percentages, not a recalculation from underlying transactions. This tool is not financial advice, and currency selection changes only the displayed symbol and formatting, no live exchange-rate conversion is performed.

Frequently asked questions