ROI Calculator
Find out exactly how much an investment earned you — in real dollars, as a percentage, and as a yearly rate you can actually compare across different investments.
What ROI actually tells you
Return on Investment measures how much money you made (or lost) relative to what you originally put in. It’s the single most common way to sanity-check whether something was worth doing — buying a stock, starting a side business, renovating a rental property, even paying for an ad campaign.
Why “annualized” ROI matters more than total ROI
A 100% ROI sounds incredible — until you find out it took 20 years to get there. Total ROI alone tells you nothing about how fast your money grew, which makes it almost useless for comparing two different opportunities. A 40% ROI over 2 years is a far better result than a 100% ROI over 20 years, even though the second number looks bigger on paper. Annualized ROI fixes this by converting any result into a fair, yearly rate — the same way interest rates are usually quoted — so you can compare investments of completely different lengths side by side.
What counts as a “good” ROI?
It depends entirely on what you’re comparing it to. As a rough anchor: the stock market has historically returned around 7–10% per year on average, and a high-yield savings account currently pays somewhere around 4–5%. Anything meaningfully below that means your money likely would have done better sitting somewhere safer and more passive — anything well above it usually means you took on more risk, more effort, or both. Neither is automatically “wrong”; it just means the ROI number alone isn’t the full story.
Frequently asked questions
No. ROI only measures the outcome, not how likely that outcome was. A risky venture and a safe one can show the exact same ROI number, which is why it’s worth weighing ROI alongside how predictable or volatile the investment actually was.
They’re often used interchangeably, but Rate of Return (ROR) usually implies a specific time period (like an annual rate), while plain ROI often doesn’t specify one at all — which is exactly why the annualized figure above is worth paying attention to.
Ideally, yes — brokerage fees, closing costs, or maintenance expenses are real costs of the investment, even if they’re easy to forget. Leaving them out will make your ROI look better than it actually was.
Yes — if the amount returned is less than what you put in, ROI is negative, meaning you lost money on the investment overall.
Want to see how this money could keep growing?
Try the Compound Interest Calculator next.
Compound Interest Calculator Back to Toolkit