The earned value calculator above takes the three numbers at the heart of earned value management — planned value, earned value and actual cost — and produces the full standard set of derived measures: cost variance, schedule variance, the cost and schedule performance indexes, the estimate at completion, the estimate to complete, the variance at completion and the to-complete performance index. It runs entirely in your browser, so the figures you type stay on your machine.
Arb Digital publishes this alongside its other free project and business calculators because earned value answers a question that a burn-down chart and a spend report cannot answer separately: not “how much have we spent” and not “how much have we done”, but how those two compare to each other and to the plan. A project that has spent 42 per cent of its budget is telling you nothing until you know what proportion of the work that money bought.
What This Earned Value Calculator Does
Earned value management works by converting progress into money. Every task has a budgeted cost. When a task is finished, the project has “earned” that budgeted amount regardless of what it actually cost to do it. Add up the budgeted cost of everything completed and you have earned value. Compare it against what you planned to have completed by now, and against what you actually spent getting there, and both a cost problem and a schedule problem become visible in the same units.
The three inputs must all be measured at the same status date, and all in the same currency. The calculator then derives every standard measure and, importantly, lets you pick between the three common ways of forecasting the final cost, because they can differ by a large margin on a troubled project and quoting only one of them without saying which is a common reporting failure.
Boundary worth stating: this is an in-flight control calculation. If you want to know whether a completed engagement made money after costs, that is a different question and the project profitability calculator answers it. Earned value tells you where you are while there is still time to act.
How to Use It
- Enter the budget at completion. The full approved budget for the authorised scope, excluding management reserve.
- Enter planned value at the status date. Read it off the baseline: the budgeted cost of the work that was scheduled to be done by now.
- Enter earned value. The budgeted cost of the work genuinely finished. If you are using a percent-complete method, multiply the percentage by the budget for that work package, not by the money spent on it.
- Enter actual cost. All costs incurred for that work, on the same accounting basis and to the same cut-off date.
- Choose a forecast method and compare it against the others. If the three EAC figures are far apart, that spread is itself the finding worth reporting.
The Formulas and How They're Calculated
Every measure comes from the same three inputs:
CV = EV − AC · SV = EV − PV · CPI = EV ÷ AC · SPI = EV ÷ PV
EAC = BAC ÷ CPI · ETC = EAC − AC · VAC = BAC − EAC · TCPI = (BAC − EV) ÷ (BAC − AC)
Work through the default figures. The budget is 500,000. At the status date the baseline said 200,000 of work should be done, but only 180,000 of budgeted work has actually been completed, and 210,000 has been spent doing it. Cost variance is 180,000 − 210,000 = −30,000, so the project is thirty thousand over budget for the work done so far. Schedule variance is 180,000 − 200,000 = −20,000, meaning twenty thousand of budgeted work that should be finished is not.
CPI is 180,000 ÷ 210,000 = 0.857, so every unit of currency spent has produced 0.857 units of budgeted value. SPI is 180,000 ÷ 200,000 = 0.900, so the project is running at ninety per cent of the planned rate of progress. Projecting the current cost performance across the remaining work gives EAC = 500,000 ÷ 0.857 = 583,333, an overrun of 83,333, which is the variance at completion. The estimate to complete is 583,333 − 210,000 = 373,333. And TCPI is (500,000 − 180,000) ÷ (500,000 − 210,000) = 320,000 ÷ 290,000 = 1.103 — the efficiency the remaining work would have to achieve to land on the original budget, against the 0.857 achieved so far. That gap is the honest measure of how recoverable the position is.
Why SPI Misleads Near the End of a Project
This is the single most important limitation of the schedule index, and it is built into the arithmetic. As a project approaches completion, earned value converges on the budget at completion, and planned value also converges on the budget at completion, because eventually everything was supposed to be finished. SPI is the ratio of the two, so it is dragged toward exactly 1.0 no matter how late the project is. A project that finishes six months behind schedule reports an SPI of 1.0 on its final day, because all the work was eventually earned and all of it was eventually planned.
That means SPI loses discriminating power precisely when stakeholders are watching hardest. In the last third of a project it drifts upward toward 1.0 on its own, which can be read as recovery when nothing has recovered. Two habits fix this. First, treat SPI as an early and mid-project indicator and stop relying on it once earned value passes roughly two-thirds of the budget. Second, note that SPI is denominated in currency, not in time: an index of 0.9 does not mean you are ten per cent behind in days, because the money and the calendar are not distributed evenly across a schedule.
The standard remedy is earned schedule, which converts earned value back into the date on which that much value was supposed to have been earned, and produces a schedule performance index in time units that does not collapse to 1.0 at the finish. Where earned schedule is unavailable, the critical path and the count of late milestones remain more honest late-stage schedule indicators than SPI. NASA's Earned Value Management resource centre publishes implementation handbooks and reporting guidance that treat these indexes as an early-warning system rather than a scorecard, which is the right framing.
Reading CPI Honestly
CPI is more robust than SPI but has its own trap: it is cumulative, so it moves slowly. A project with a strong first quarter and a disastrous second can still show a respectable cumulative CPI while current performance is falling apart. Calculate a period CPI as well — earned value in the last month divided by actual cost in the last month — and compare it to the cumulative figure. If the period value is well below the cumulative one, the trend is negative even though the headline still looks acceptable.
There is also long-standing evidence in government programme oversight that CPI stabilises early and rarely improves afterwards. That is why the default EAC method here divides the budget by CPI: it assumes performance to date continues, which is usually a more defensible forecast than assuming the remaining work will suddenly run to plan. The US Government Accountability Office's Cost Estimating and Assessment Guide sets out the best practices for developing reliable cost estimates and for managing programme cost through earned value management, including how forecasts should be substantiated.
Where the Numbers Go Wrong Before You Calculate Anything
Earned value is only as good as the earned value measurement, and this is where most implementations fail. If teams self-report percent complete, work drifts to being ninety per cent done for weeks, which inflates EV and makes both indexes look better than reality. The fix is objective measurement rules agreed in advance: fixed formulas such as 0/100 (credit nothing until the package is finished) or 50/50 (half on start, half on completion) for short packages, and physical measures such as units delivered or tests passed for longer ones.
The second failure is timing mismatch. Actual cost that excludes an unbilled subcontractor invoice while earned value includes the work that subcontractor did will make CPI look excellent for one period and terrible in the next. Accrue costs to the same cut-off as the progress you are crediting. The third is scope change: if approved changes move the budget at completion, every historic index is measured against a different baseline, and comparing this month's CPI to last month's becomes meaningless unless the change is documented and the series is rebaselined deliberately. For the surrounding budget work, the budget calculator and marketing budget calculator handle allocation, while the percentage change calculator is useful for tracking period-on-period movement in any of these figures.
Arb Digital scopes and builds websites with fixed deliverables and a clear schedule, so progress is measurable rather than reported.
See Web Design Services Talk to Arb DigitalCommon Mistakes to Avoid
- Using actual cost as earned value. Earned value is the budgeted cost of completed work. Feeding in what you spent makes CPI exactly 1.0 forever and destroys the entire method.
- Trusting SPI in the final third. It converges on 1.0 as the project completes, so a late project reports on-schedule performance on the day it finishes late.
- Reporting one EAC without saying which formula produced it. The three standard methods can differ by a large margin on a troubled project, and the difference is not a rounding detail.
- Letting teams self-assess percent complete. Without objective measurement rules, earned value inflates and both indexes flatter the project until the deadline arrives.
- Comparing indexes across a silent rebaseline. If the budget at completion changed, this month's figures and last month's are measured against different plans.
Related Free Tools From Arb Digital
For the after-the-fact margin question there is the project profitability calculator. Budget allocation is handled by the budget calculator and the marketing budget calculator. To measure the return on a completed investment, use the investment ROI calculator, and for operating performance the EBITDA calculator. The percentage change calculator covers period-on-period movement. Everything else is in the free online tools hub.
Frequently Asked Questions
Planned value is the budgeted cost of the work scheduled by now, earned value is the budgeted cost of the work actually finished, and actual cost is what was really spent on that finished work. All three must be measured at the same status date.
The most common method divides the budget at completion by the cost performance index, which assumes performance to date continues. Two alternatives add the remaining budgeted work to actual cost, or divide that remaining work by CPI multiplied by SPI when schedule pressure is also expected to persist.
Because both earned value and planned value converge on the budget at completion as the work finishes. Their ratio is therefore pulled toward 1.0 regardless of how late the project is, which makes SPI unreliable in the final third.
No. SPI is measured in currency, not in time, and cost is not spread evenly across a schedule. It indicates that work worth ninety per cent of the planned value has been earned, which may correspond to a very different delay in days.
TCPI is the cost efficiency the remaining work must achieve to finish on the original budget. Comparing it against the CPI achieved so far shows whether recovery is plausible: a TCPI far above a CPI that has been stable is a strong signal the budget is no longer realistic.
Yes. That means work is being completed both faster than planned and for less than budgeted. It is worth verifying before celebrating, because it can also indicate that easy work was pulled forward or that earned value is being credited too generously.
A negative cost variance means actual cost exceeds the budgeted value of the work completed, so the project is over budget for the work done. A negative schedule variance means less work has been finished than the baseline required by that date.
No. The calculation runs in your browser as local JavaScript. The page makes no network request, stores nothing and logs nothing, so your project figures never leave your device.
This calculator performs the standard earned value arithmetic for information and planning purposes only. It is not financial, accounting or investment advice, and the forecasts it produces depend entirely on the quality of the inputs and the measurement rules behind them.
