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Enter the SIP you intend to start, the return you expect and when you need the money. See the corpus you forfeit for every month you wait, and the larger instalment it would take to still land on the same number.
Drag a slider or type a value.
“Next month”, “after the bonus”, “once the loan closes” — pick the wait you are actually considering.
Raise the instalment with your income each year
You would give up
₹12,38,225
≈ ₹12.4L · 12% of the corpus you could have had
Same ₹10,000 SIP, same 12% return, same target date — only the start moves. Tap a bar to load that delay.
Cost of the same 1 year delay across return assumptions. A higher return makes waiting more expensive, not less.
A delay feels like it removes instalments from the front of the plan, where they are small and forgettable. Mathematically it does the opposite: it removes them from the far end of the compounding curve. Your first instalment is the only one that gets the full horizon to grow — in a 20-year plan at 12%, one rupee invested in month one becomes about ₹10.9, while a rupee invested in the final year barely grows at all.
So the months you postpone are the most valuable months you will ever invest. That is why skipping ₹1.2 lakh of instalments can cost ₹13 lakh of corpus, and why the catch-up instalment rises far faster than the length of the delay.
P — monthly instalment
i — monthly return (annual ÷ 12 ÷ 100)
n — instalments if you start today
d — months of delay; the target date does not move, so you simply make fewer instalments
Each is reasonable. Each has a price on this page. Tap one to load the delay it usually implies.
At your current assumptions — 12% return over 20 years — here is what twelve months of waiting removes from the corpus.
Illustrative. Mutual fund returns are not assured and vary with the fund and market cycle.
A SIP delay calculator shows how much wealth you lose by postponing your Systematic Investment Plan. It compares the maturity corpus if you start your SIP today against the smaller corpus you would build if you delay starting by a few months or years, keeping the same monthly amount and target end date. The gap between the two is your 'cost of delay'.
The cost of delaying a SIP is often far larger than the missed instalments, because of compounding. For example, a ₹10,000 monthly SIP at 12% p.a. for 20 years can grow to around ₹99 lakh; delaying it by just 3 years cuts the corpus by roughly ₹33 lakh even though you only skipped ₹3.6 lakh of investments. Use the calculator above to see the exact rupee impact for your numbers.
Starting your SIP late means your money has fewer years to compound, so the final corpus shrinks disproportionately. The last few years of an SIP contribute the most growth because the accumulated amount is largest, so a late start removes exactly those high-growth years. This is why financial planners stress starting early over investing more later.
Starting early matters because of the power of compounding — your returns start earning their own returns. An extra 3–5 years in the market at the beginning can add lakhs to your final corpus, since early contributions have the longest time to grow. Even a small monthly SIP started early can beat a larger SIP started years later.
Yes. Delaying a SIP by even one year can cost you several lakhs over a long horizon, because you lose a full year of compounding on every future instalment. The longer your overall investment period, the bigger the impact of a one-year delay.
The calculator computes the SIP maturity value using the formula FV = P × [((1 + i)^n − 1) / i] × (1 + i), where P is the monthly amount, i is the monthly rate (annual return ÷ 12 ÷ 100) and n is the number of months. It calculates this for the full investment period (starting today) and again for the shorter period after your delay, then shows the difference as the cost of delaying.
Timing the market rarely beats time in the market. SIPs already average out your purchase cost across market highs and lows through rupee cost averaging, so waiting for a 'perfect' entry usually costs more in lost compounding than it saves. For most long-term investors, starting now is better than waiting.
