What is net worth?
Net worth is the value of everything you own minus everything you owe. It is the single best snapshot of your financial health at a point in time, better than salary, better than portfolio size, better than monthly savings rate. A high-earning professional with ₹50 lakh of credit-card debt has lower net worth than a salaried employee who owns a paid-off ₹1 crore house. Net worth tells the truth.
Net worth formula
Net Worth = Total Assets − Total Liabilities
The formula is trivial, but the discipline is in correctly classifying and valuing each item. The calculator above lets you tag every entry by category (Cash, Investments, Real Estate, Vehicles, etc.) so you can see exactly where the value sits and which category dominates.
What counts as an asset?
Anything you own that has a market value you could realise if you sold or redeemed it today.
- Liquid assets: savings account, current account, fixed deposits, liquid mutual funds, money in digital wallets.
- Investments: equity holdings, mutual fund units (current NAV × units), bonds, ETFs, crypto.
- Retirement: EPF balance, PPF, NPS, superannuation. Use the latest passbook or e-statement value.
- Real estate: current market value of every property you own (not what you paid for it). For rental properties, use a recent broker valuation or online estimate, not the registered/circle value.
- Vehicles: current resale value, not on-road purchase price. Cars depreciate ~15–20% the first year and ~10% per year thereafter.
- Other: gold and jewellery (at current rate), business equity, art, collectibles, intellectual property if commercially valued.
What counts as a liability?
Every rupee you currently owe. Use outstanding principal, not the original loan amount or total of remaining EMIs.
- Mortgage / home loan:outstanding principal from your bank's latest statement.
- Vehicle loans: same: outstanding principal, not total EMIs left.
- Education loans: including the capitalised interest accrued during the moratorium period.
- Credit-card debt: full revolving balance, not just the minimum due.
- Personal loans, BNPL: outstanding principal across all lenders.
- Tax owed: self-assessment tax due, advance tax shortfall, GST liabilities for businesses.
Worked example
Say a 32-year-old salaried professional in Bengaluru owns:
- Savings & FD: ₹6,00,000
- Mutual funds & stocks: ₹18,00,000
- EPF + NPS: ₹9,00,000
- Apartment (market value): ₹85,00,000
- Car (resale): ₹6,00,000
Total assets = ₹1,24,00,000
And owes:
- Home-loan principal outstanding: ₹62,00,000
- Car-loan principal outstanding: ₹3,00,000
- Credit-card balance: ₹40,000
Total liabilities = ₹65,40,000
Net worth = ₹1,24,00,000 − ₹65,40,000 = ₹58,60,000
How to use this net worth calculator
- Add every asset.Use the dropdown to pick a category (Cash, Investments, Real Estate, etc.), give it a name (e.g. "Zerodha portfolio"), and the current value. Repeat until the list is exhaustive.
- Add every liability. Outstanding principal only. The calculator will sum them automatically.
- Read the pie charts. Concentration in any one asset (e.g. 80% real estate) is a liquidity warning; concentration in any one liability (e.g. 60% credit-card debt) is a cost-of-debt warning.
- Save and revisit quarterly.The data is persisted to your browser's local storage. Compare the current snapshot to last quarter's. Your quarterly delta is the most honest measure of whether your finances are improving.
- Export a PDF for personal records or sharing with your CA/financial planner.
Net worth benchmarks by age (India, illustrative)
These bands are rough, drawn from published surveys (RBI household finance, NSO consumption data, private wealth reports) and are meant for self-orientation only. Lifestyle, geography (tier-1 vs tier-2/3), and inheritance create huge variance. Do not optimise for the band, optimise for the trajectory.
| Age | Median (India) | Top 25% |
|---|---|---|
| 20–29 | ₹2–5 L | ₹15 L+ |
| 30–39 | ₹15–25 L | ₹75 L+ |
| 40–49 | ₹40–60 L | ₹2 Cr+ |
| 50–59 | ₹75 L–1 Cr | ₹4 Cr+ |
| 60+ | ₹1–1.5 Cr | ₹6 Cr+ |
Is negative net worth bad?
Negative net worth (owing more than you own) is common and temporary for early-career professionals and recent graduates with student loans, recent home buyers within the first 3–5 years of an EMI, or anyone who recently took on a major business loan. What matters is the trajectory: are your liabilities being paid down faster than they grow, and are your assets compounding? Recompute every quarter. The slope tells the story, not the sign.
How to grow your net worth
Three levers. Pull them all, in this order:
- Increase income. Skill upgrades, role changes, a side business: at every career stage, income tends to be the biggest lever in absolute terms.
- Reduce high-cost liabilities first. Credit-card debt at 36–42% APR destroys net worth faster than equity SIPs can build it. Personal loans (12–18%) are next. Home loans (8–9%) come last since the tax deductions and inflation-adjusted real cost make them less urgent.
- Invest the surplus. Use a SIP to channel monthly savings into equity for long horizons (10y+), PPF for tax-free long-term debt, and FDs only for short-term emergency-fund balances. The compounding does the heavy lifting once liabilities are under control.
Common net-worth mistakes
- Inflated asset values. Using purchase price for property/vehicles instead of current market value flatters net worth. Update annually.
- Forgetting to count cars as depreciating. A car loses ~50% in 5 years; if you bought it for ₹15 lakh five years ago, the asset is ₹7–8 lakh today.
- Confusing salary with net worth. Two professionals with the same CTC can have wildly different net worths. The difference is what you do with the cash flow.
- Ignoring lifestyle inflation. Bigger income that flows entirely into bigger EMIs leaves net worth flat. Track the slope, not the headline number.
- Counting employer EPF contributions as cash. EPF is illiquid until 58 (with limited exceptions). It counts as net worth but it is not spendable savings, so keep a separate emergency fund.
Related calculators
- SIP Calculator - model how a monthly SIP grows the "Investments" bucket of your net worth.
- EMI Calculator - see the breakdown of principal vs interest in your loan EMI to plan faster pay-down.
- PPF Calculator - project your PPF maturity, a key "Retirement" bucket entry.
- Lumpsum Calculator - model a windfall (bonus, inheritance) added to the investments bucket.