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Holding Period Return Calculator

Find your investment's holding period return.

How it is calculated

The holding period return is the total gain over the time you held the investment, as a percentage of what you started with: HPR = (end value − begin value + income) ÷ begin value × 100. Begin is the amount invested or the starting market value, end is the value at the end of the period, and income is everything received in cash along the way, such as dividends, interest or rent. All three must be filled in (enter 0 if there was no income), and the beginning value must be above zero. A loss shows as a negative percentage. The result is for the whole period and is not annualized, so a 14.60% over three years is not comparable to 14.60% over one year. Fees, taxes and reinvestment of income are not modelled.

Worked example

You bought shares for 2,500 and, some time later, they are worth 2,780. During that time they paid 85 in dividends. The price gain is 2,780 − 2,500 = 280. Adding the income gives 280 + 85 = 365 total gain. Dividing by the starting value: 365 ÷ 2,500 = 0.146, and multiplied by 100 the holding period return is 14.60%. Without the dividends the figure would have been 280 ÷ 2,500 = 11.20%, so the income contributes 3.40 percentage points.

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Common mistakes

  • Treating the result as a yearly rate. HPR covers whatever period you held; to compare a 6-month holding with a 3-year one you have to annualize it separately.
  • Forgetting the income and counting price change only. Dividends or interest received count as return, and leaving them out understates it (here 11.20% against 14.60%).
  • Leaving the income box empty. The tool needs a value in every field, so type 0 if there was no income.
  • Entering the ending value as the profit instead of the total value. The end figure is what the holding is worth now, not the gain.
  • Mixing in additional purchases or withdrawals during the period. HPR assumes one starting amount; if you added money part-way, this figure does not describe the return correctly.

Sources

About this calculator

This calculator finds an investment's holding period return using HPR = (ending value − beginning value + income) ÷ beginning value, capturing the total return over any arbitrary period — whether days or decades — by including not just price appreciation but also income earned along the way, like dividends, interest, or rental income. Unlike an annualized return such as CAGR, HPR reports the actual total return for the specific period held, without normalizing it to a yearly rate.

Investors use it to evaluate the actual performance of a stock, bond, or real estate holding over the exact time they owned it; portfolio managers use it as a building block before annualizing returns for comparison across investments held for different lengths of time; and finance students use it as a foundational return calculation before moving on to time-weighted and money-weighted return measures.

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  • Editorial team

    The figure covers the whole holding period, not a year. To compare investments held for different lengths, convert it: a 30 percent return over three years is about 9.1 percent a year, because 1.3 to the power one third is 1.0914. Fees and taxes are not deducted unless you reduce the income figure yourself. How long did you hold yours?

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