Home Calculators Step-Up SIP Calculator
A SIP that grows with your income
Most people can invest more next year than this year. A step-up SIP raises the instalment by a fixed percentage every twelve months — and this calculator also reports what the final corpus is worth in today's rupees, because a number thirty years out is easy to misread.
Your numbers
Change anything; the result updates as you type.
Result
Raising the SIP is one lever. The return is the other.
Over twenty years a 10% annual step-up roughly doubles a flat SIP’s corpus — largely because you put in nearly three times as much — while two extra points of return add about a third on the same contributions. For that second lever, MindForge publishes the backtest behind each of its three strategies, and the two paid ones trade in their own broker-verified Zerodha accounts.
How a month works — about ten minutes on the 1stAlready investing every month? How a monthly amount goes into a book
How a step-up SIP is calculated
There is no single closed-form line for this, because the instalment changes. The calculator runs the schedule month by month: each month's instalment is added to the balance, the balance grows at one twelfth of the annual return, and every twelfth month the instalment is increased by the step-up percentage.
balance = (balance + instalment) × (1 + i) · instalment × (1 + step) every 12 months
Why the inflation-adjusted figure is the one to read
A thirty-year projection in future rupees flatters itself. At 6% inflation, prices roughly double every twelve years — so a corpus of ₹5 crore in 2056 buys what a little under ₹90 lakh buys today. The calculator shows both figures side by side, and the second one is the one to plan against.
What a step-up actually buys you
- It front-loads less and back-loads more. The later instalments are larger but compound for less time, so a step-up adds less than the same money invested earlier would have.
- It tracks your salary. A 10% step-up on a 10% raise keeps your savings rate constant instead of letting lifestyle absorb the increase.
- It is not a substitute for the return. Compare a 10% step-up against a two-point higher return in this calculator; over twenty years the step-up moves the corpus about three times as far, but only because it also asks for far more money — the return is the lever that works on what you already invest.
Assumptions this makes
- Instalments at the start of each month; the step-up applies once every twelve months, including in the final year.
- A constant return, compounded monthly, and a constant inflation rate for the real-value figure.
- No fees or taxes. Markets do not deliver the same return every year, so treat the output as an illustration of compounding — not a forecast, and not investment advice.