Enter a periodic payment, interest rate, and term to find what a stream of equal payments will grow to by the end.
How to Use the Future Value of an Annuity Calculator
Fill in the payment per period, the annual rate, payments per year, and years, then choose Ordinary Annuity or Annuity Due to match when the money actually moves — end of period or start.
Save $500 a month for ten years and the total sitting in the account at the end isn't $60,000 — it's every one of those deposits plus everything it earned along the way, compounding on top of itself the whole time. That combined total is what this calculator produces.
The Formula
FV = PMT × ((1 + r)ⁿ − 1) ÷ rr is the rate per period (annual rate ÷ payments per year), n is the total number of payments. At a 0% rate the growth term disappears entirely and the calculator just sums the deposits: FV = PMT × n.
Deposits made at the start of each period — an annuity due — sit in the account for one extra period each, so every dollar earns one more compounding cycle:
FV(due) = FV(ordinary) × (1 + r)Deposit Timing Compounds, Literally
Automate a 401(k) contribution the day your paycheck lands and you've built an annuity due without thinking about it; wait until the last day of the month and it's ordinary. The gap between the two grows with the rate and the number of periods — at 6% over ten years of monthly deposits it's around half a percent of the total, which on a six-figure balance isn't nothing.
Worked out: $500 a month, ordinary, at 6% for ten years lands around $81,940. Switch nothing but the toggle to Annuity Due and it climbs to roughly $82,350 — the same 120 deposits, just each one credited a month earlier, so each dollar spends one extra period compounding.
Payments per Year Isn't Just a Label
Changing payments per year without adjusting the payment amount changes how much gets contributed in total, not just how it compounds — moving from 12 monthly $500 deposits to 26 biweekly $500 deposits more than doubles what actually goes in over a year, so naturally the future value jumps too. The more interesting comparison holds the annual total fixed instead: split $6,000 a year into 12 payments of $500 versus 26 payments of about $230.77, and the biweekly version still edges out the monthly one, because smaller, more frequent deposits spend slightly more time earning interest on average.