How to calculate CAGR (compound annual growth rate)
✓ Verified in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3 ✓ Verified in Google Sheets (2026-08-30)Work out the average yearly growth rate between a starting and ending value.
The formula
| App | Formula | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Excel (desktop) | =(B2/A2)^(1/C2)-1 | A2=start value, B2=end value, C2=years. Or the built-in =RRI(C2,A2,B2). |
| Google Sheets | =(B2/A2)^(1/C2)-1 | Identical; RRI also available. |
| LibreOffice Calc | =(B2/A2)^(1/C2)-1 | Identical; RRI also available. |
How it works
CAGR is (end/start)^(1/years) − 1: doubling in 10 years is 2^(1/10) − 1 ≈ 7.18% per year — the steady rate that would produce the same result. Format as a percentage. It smooths over the bumps by design, which is both its point and its limitation: volatile year-to-year paths with the same endpoints give the same CAGR. RRI(periods,start,end) is the same math built in.
Verified, not just documented
We ran =ROUND((B2/A2)^(1/C2)-1,4) in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3 (headless, with forced recalculation) and it returned 0.0718 — exactly the expected result. We then ran the same formulas in Google Sheets, executed 2026-08-30: a formula-only workbook goes into Google Drive, which converts it to a Sheet and recalculates every formula with Google’s own engine, and comes back out as .xlsx carrying the values Google computed. It returned 0.0718 for the worked example, the same value LibreOffice produced. Both engines’ numbers on this page are executed results. The Excel formula follows Microsoft’s official documented syntax — we do not run desktop Excel.