ROI Calculator

Return on Investment (ROI) is a universal financial metric used to evaluate the profitability of an investment relative to its initial cost. Whether you are analyzing a stock portfolio, a real estate purchase, or an online marketing campaign, ROI provides a simple percentage that shows how efficiently your capital was deployed.

Because ROI is expressed as a percentage rather than a raw dollar amount, it allows investors to easily compare the efficiency of different investments side-by-side, regardless of the actual monetary scale.

The basic formula for evaluating simple ROI requires only two numbers: your initial investment cost, and the final value (or return) of that investment.

Real-World Calculation Example

Imagine you purchased $5,000 worth of shares in an index fund. Two years later, you sell those shares for $6,200.

• Step 1: $6,200 (Final Value) - $5,000 (Initial Cost) = $1,200 Net Profit.
• Step 2: ($1,200 / $5,000) = 0.24.
• Step 3: 0.24 × 100 = 24% Total ROI.

The biggest flaw of the standard ROI calculation is that it completely ignores time.

A 50% ROI sounds incredible. However, a 50% return achieved over 2 months is drastically different than a 50% return achieved over 15 years. To account for this, professional investors rely on Annualized ROI (also known as the Compound Annual Growth Rate, or CAGR).

1. Enter your initial investment: The total capital you put in — a purchase price, campaign budget, or business cost.
2. Enter the final value or total return: What the investment is worth now, or what you received when you exited. Enter a value below the initial investment if you lost money.
3. Enter the time period in years: How long you held the investment. This unlocks the annualized ROI calculation so you can compare investments of different durations on equal footing.
4. Read total ROI and annualized yield: Both metrics display instantly — total ROI shows the overall return, annualized ROI shows the year-over-year equivalent rate.

• Individual investors comparing asset classes who want to know whether their rental property's annual return is actually better or worse than their stock portfolio — using annualized ROI to put both on the same time-adjusted scale.
• Small business owners and operators evaluating capital expenditures — new equipment, an expansion, a marketing campaign — who need a simple way to model expected return before committing budget.
• Marketing managers and media buyers calculating campaign ROI or explaining the difference between ROI and ROAS to stakeholders who use the terms interchangeably but need to understand why a high ROAS doesn't always mean a profitable campaign.

• Annualized ROI included: Simple ROI ignores time. This calculator shows both total ROI and annualized yield so you can compare a 6-month marketing campaign against a 5-year real estate hold on equal terms.
• Free, no account required: No subscription, no paywall. Run as many scenarios as you need.
• 100% private: Your financial figures are calculated entirely in your browser — never sent to any server.
• Handles negative ROI: Accurately calculates and displays losses as negative percentages, so you can quantify underperforming investments with the same precision as profitable ones.

• Investment comparison: Compare a 3-year stock position against a 5-year real estate hold using annualized ROI — the only fair comparison when holding periods differ.
• Marketing campaign analysis: Calculate true ROI on a Google Ads or email campaign by inputting total ad spend as the investment and net revenue (after COGS) as the return — not gross revenue, which overstates campaign performance.
• Business purchase evaluation: A buyer considering acquiring a small business inputs the purchase price as the initial investment and projects expected annual profit as the return to model a 5-year ROI before making an offer.