ROI Calculator
Calculate return on investment for any project, ad campaign, or asset purchase - enter cost and final value, get ROI%, gain, and annualized return.
About the ROI Calculator
The ROI Calculator measures how much a project, investment, or campaign returned relative to what you spent on it. Enter the initial cost and the final value (or revenue generated), and the tool returns the net gain, the percentage return, and the annualized return adjusted for how long the investment was held.
Return on investment is the universal yardstick for comparing opportunities, but it is easy to misuse. A 20% ROI over one week and a 20% ROI over five years are wildly different - the annualized view, included by default, makes them directly comparable so you can pick the better use of capital.
Common use cases
- Compare two competing projects when capital is limited
- Justify ad-campaign budgets to a finance team
- Evaluate stock, real-estate, or alternative-asset trades
- Decide whether a piece of equipment will pay for itself in a reasonable time
Tips for accurate results
Always include opportunity cost - the return you would have earned on the next-best alternative - when judging ROI. A 6% ROI looks good in isolation but loses to a 10% index fund every time. Use the annualized number, not the total, to compare investments of different durations.
Privacy & data handling
The ROI Calculator runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is uploaded, logged, or shared with third parties - the math happens locally and your inputs disappear when you close the tab. There is no signup, no email collection, and no daily-use limit.
How is ROI calculated?
ROI is (Net Gain ÷ Cost) × 100, where Net Gain is the final value minus the initial investment minus any operating costs. So a $1,000 investment that returns $1,300 after $50 of fees has a net gain of $250, giving an ROI of 25%. The formula treats time as irrelevant by default - the annualized ROI option corrects for that.
What's the difference between ROI and annualized ROI?
Plain ROI is the total percentage gain over the whole holding period, no matter how long it took. Annualized ROI converts that total into an equivalent per-year rate using (1 + ROI)^(1/years) − 1, so you can compare a 3-month flip against a 5-year hold on equal footing.
Should I use ROI or NPV for big decisions?
ROI is a fast sanity check; NPV is the rigorous answer for anything over a year because it discounts future cash flows back to today using your cost of capital. For ad-campaign or quick-flip evaluations ROI is fine. For multi-year capex, prefer NPV plus IRR - those account for the time value of money that simple ROI ignores.
Does this tool handle multiple cash flows?
The basic ROI mode handles a single inflow and outflow. For a series of cash flows over multiple periods, use our NPV/IRR calculator - it accepts a year-by-year cash flow stream and tells you both the discounted present value and the rate of return implied by the stream.
Is a 20% ROI good?
It depends entirely on time horizon and risk. A 20% return on a one-day arbitrage is excellent. A 20% return over 10 years is roughly 1.8% annualized, worse than savings. Always look at annualized ROI and compare against an appropriate benchmark - S&P 500 averages ~10% annualized, so a multi-year hold under that bar is underperforming.
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