Pick a goal, set a deadline, and find out exactly how much to save every month.
Your income (optional)
Add this and each goal below will show you what share of your income it would take, so you can tell at a glance if the plan is realistic.
What are you saving for?
per month
Target date
You will deposit
Interest earned
Goal amount
Your savings journey
Squeeze Meter
How much of your income does this goal require?
of your monthly take-home
Suggested adjustment
Goal Accelerator
Drag to see how saving more each month changes your deadline
Saving extra per month
+₹0
Without extra saving
per month
With extra saving
per month
Combined monthly savings needed
Learn
Most people have goals. Buy a car in two years. Clear the house down payment by 35. Take a proper vacation once things settle down. But there is a difference between a goal that lives in your head and one that has a number and a date attached to it. This calculator is about turning the first kind into the second.
When you say "I want to save for 18 months," it is an abstract exercise. When you say "I want this by October 2026," it is suddenly real. You can picture it. You know what season it is. You can count backward to now and see how much runway you have.
This calculator counts months from today to your chosen month and year, always rounding up. If you are in the middle of April and your target is May 2026, that counts as 1 full month. You will never get a result that undercounts your time and forces an impossible savings rate.
Savings goals are typically short to medium term. A car in 2 years, a vacation in 8 months. Equity markets are volatile over short periods. You could be down 20% right when you need the money. For money you actually need by a specific date, conservative instruments like FDs, RDs, or liquid mutual funds are more appropriate.
The current SBI FD rate for 1 to 3 year deposits sits around 6.8%. HDFC and Axis are slightly higher. 6% is a floor estimate. If your savings go into a recurring deposit, you can safely use 6 to 7%. If you use a liquid or short-duration mutual fund, 7 to 8% is reasonable. The calculator lets you adjust this.
A simple rule: If you cannot afford to see your savings drop in value before the goal date, do not use equity. Use an FD, RD, or liquid fund. The slightly lower return is the cost of certainty, and for specific goals with specific deadlines, certainty is worth paying for.
This calculator uses the standard recurring deposit formula. You save a fixed amount each month. That amount earns interest every month on the growing balance. By the end of the tenure, the total of your deposits plus the compounded interest equals your target.
The formula is: Monthly savings = Target amount multiplied by the monthly rate, divided by the quantity (1 plus the monthly rate) raised to the power of total months, minus 1. In practice this means that the longer your timeline, the smaller your monthly burden, and the more of your target amount comes from interest rather than your own deposits.
When you enter your monthly take-home salary, the calculator shows what percentage of your income this goal will consume. Under 20% is comfortable. Most households can absorb a savings commitment of that size without major lifestyle changes.
Between 20% and 35%, the goal is achievable but it will require discipline. You will feel it in your monthly budget. Small unplanned expenses can put you off track. It is worth building a small buffer.
Above 35% means the required monthly savings is genuinely high relative to your income. This does not mean the goal is impossible. It means the timeline is too short, the target is too large, or both. Extending the deadline by 6 to 12 months often brings the number into a manageable range, and the calculator shows you exactly what that looks like.
Most people are not saving for just one thing. There is the car and the vacation and the emergency fund, all competing for the same salary. When you add multiple goals here, each one is calculated independently. The timelines can be different, the return rates can be different, and changing one does not affect another.
What the combined summary bar does is simply add up the monthly savings needed across all your active goals. That total is the honest number you need to set aside every month if you want all of these goals to happen on the dates you have chosen.
The honest question to ask yourself: Is the combined monthly number something you can actually set aside without disrupting your life? If not, the answer is not to give up on a goal. It is to push the timeline out on the least urgent one. A longer runway means smaller monthly deposits and more of the work done by interest.
The Emergency Fund chip above pre-fills ₹1,00,000, but that number means nothing without knowing your own expenses. The real rule most financial planners use is 3 to 6 months of your essential monthly expenses, rent, EMIs, groceries, utilities, insurance premiums, not your full salary. If you spend ₹40,000 a month to actually run your life, a reasonable emergency fund sits between ₹1.2 lakh and ₹2.4 lakh. Edit the target amount here to match your own number before you calculate, the chip is a starting point, not an answer.
The other thing that makes an emergency fund different from every other goal on this page: it is not really a goal with an end date. Once you hit the target, you do not stop, you just stop actively adding to it unless you dip in and need to rebuild it. Treat the target date here as "when I want this fully funded by," not "when I am done thinking about it." And keep the money somewhere you can actually reach in a day or two, a savings account or a liquid fund, not a 3 year FD with a penalty for breaking it early. An emergency fund you cannot touch quickly during an actual emergency has failed at its one job.
The Wedding chip defaults to ₹5,00,000, which covers a modest, well-planned wedding in a smaller city. In a metro, with a few hundred guests and a venue that is not negotiable on price, the real number is routinely ₹10 to ₹25 lakh or more. Before you calculate, get an honest estimate from people who have actually done this recently in your city, not a number that feels comfortable to type.
What makes a wedding goal genuinely harder to plan than a car or a gadget is that the date almost never moves, and the final bill almost always grows past the first estimate. Catering headcounts creep up. Someone wants better flowers. The venue has a mandatory minimum spend you did not know about. A sensible way to use this calculator for a wedding is to run it twice, once with your realistic estimate, and once with that estimate plus 20%. Save toward the higher number. If you come in under budget, that is a good problem to have.
Education costs in India have historically risen faster than general inflation, often estimated at 10 to 12% a year for professional courses like engineering, medicine, or an MBA, against general inflation closer to 5 to 6%. This matters because this calculator, like every calculator on this page, treats your target amount as fixed. If you set ₹5,00,000 today for a goal 10 years away, that is what the math works toward. It will not quietly inflate the target for you.
For a short runway, 2 to 3 years, that gap barely matters and you can safely use today's fee as your target. For a longer runway, 10 to 15 years for a child who is still young, the actual cost by the time you need it could easily be double or triple today's figure. The practical fix is simple even if the math is not built in: look up today's fees for the kind of institution you are aiming for, then compound that forward yourself at 10 to 12% a year for however many years you have, and use that larger number as your target here, not today's fee.
The Home Down Payment chip defaults to ₹10,00,000, roughly 20% of a ₹50 lakh flat, which is the minimum down payment most Indian banks require under RBI's loan-to-value rules for that price bracket. But the down payment itself is rarely the only cash you need on the day you register the property. Stamp duty, registration charges, brokerage, and moving costs typically add another 7 to 10% of the property value on top, money that has to come from the same pool of savings, not from the home loan.
A more honest target: down payment plus those extra costs combined, not the down payment alone. If you want to see exactly how the loan-to-value rule applies and what the full cost of buying looks like against renting, our Rent vs Buy calculator walks through that in detail.
Once you see your required monthly savings, you might wonder what would happen if you put in a little more. The accelerator slider lets you add extra savings on top of the required amount and instantly see how many months earlier you will reach your goal.
This feature is not about pushing you to save more. It is about giving you a concrete trade-off to think about. An extra 2,000 rupees per month might mean reaching your goal 3 months earlier. Whether that trade-off is worth it depends entirely on your situation. The calculator just makes the choice visible.
Whatever you are saving for, car, vacation, phone, wedding, or something this calculator does not have a chip for, the method does not change. Pick a number, pick a date, and let a savings goal calculator show you the one number that actually matters: what to set aside every month to get there.
FAQ
You enter your target amount, target date, and expected annual return on your savings. The calculator uses the recurring deposit formula to find the exact monthly savings needed, then shows you a milestone timeline of how your corpus grows month by month.
The default is 6% per year, which is conservative and matches current FD and RD rates. If you plan to park savings in a liquid mutual fund, you may use 7 to 8%. Avoid using equity return rates for short to medium term goals since markets can be volatile over 1 to 5 year periods.
Yes. After calculating your first goal you can add up to two more goals. Each goal is calculated independently with its own target amount, date and return rate. The dashboard then shows the total monthly savings needed to hit all your goals combined.
The Squeeze Meter shows what percentage of your monthly take-home salary this goal requires. Under 20% is green and comfortable. 20 to 35% is yellow and tight but manageable. Above 35% is red and the calculator suggests extending your timeline to reduce the monthly burden.
The Goal Accelerator slider lets you explore exactly that. Drag the slider to add extra monthly savings and instantly see how many months earlier you will reach your goal. Even small additions make a meaningful difference when compounding is involved.
It depends on the time horizon and how much risk you can take. This calculator assumes a fixed return like an FD or RD, which suits goals under 3 to 5 years where you cannot afford to see the amount drop in value. A SIP calculator models market-linked mutual fund returns, which historically perform better over 5 plus years but carry real short-term risk. For a car or vacation next year, use this. For a goal 10 years out, a SIP is usually the better tool.
Missing an occasional month will not break your goal, but it does mean the monthly amount for the remaining months needs to go up slightly to stay on track, since you have fewer months left for the same target. If this happens often, it is worth recalculating with a longer timeline rather than assuming you will simply catch up later, since catching up gets harder the closer you get to the deadline.
Below 3 months, compounding barely contributes anything, almost the entire target comes from your own deposits regardless of the return rate you choose. At that point a recurring deposit style calculator adds little value over simply dividing the target by the number of months. If your goal is genuinely that close, a lump sum in a savings account or a short FD is usually simpler than a monthly plan.
Nothing happens automatically, this is a planning tool, not a locked account. If the date arrives and you are short, you have the same two choices you always had: extend the timeline, or treat whatever you have saved as a smaller, ready version of the goal, a cheaper car, a shorter trip. The Squeeze Meter and the advice it gives when a goal is running tight are both meant to help you catch this early, before the deadline, not after.
It helps, but it is not required by the calculator, which treats each goal purely as a number, not a bank account. Many people find separate accounts, or at least separate FDs or RDs, useful because it removes the temptation to quietly dip into the vacation fund to cover an emergency fund shortfall. If you would rather keep one account and track it mentally, the math here works exactly the same either way.