CAPE Ratio Calculator

The cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio: the current price divided by average inflation-adjusted earnings over about ten years. It exists because a single year's earnings can be flattered or crushed by where you are in the business cycle.

Yes. CAPE, Shiller PE, Shiller P/E 10 and P/E 10 all describe the same measure, popularized by Robert Shiller and John Campbell. The name varies; the arithmetic does not.

Take earnings per share for each of the last ten years, restate each one in today's money using inflation, average them, then divide the current price by that average. The inflation adjustment is the step that distinguishes it from a plain ten-year average P/E.

A normal P/E divides by one year's earnings. CAPE divides by a decade of inflation-adjusted earnings. For a stable business the two are close; for a cyclical one they can differ enormously, and that difference is the useful signal.

It is long enough to span a typical business cycle and short enough to remain relevant to the current business. The choice is convention rather than mathematics, which is why this calculator accepts any number of years.

Just CAPE calculated over a ten-year window, sometimes written P/E 10. It is the standard form, and the one quoted when someone cites 'the CAPE ratio' without qualification.

For an individual company, its annual reports or 10-K filings, and most financial data providers show a ten-year EPS history. For the US market as a whole, Robert Shiller's dataset at Yale carries index earnings back to 1871.

Yes, and it matters a lot. Enter oldest first. The calculator treats the last value as the most recent year and applies no inflation uplift to it; reversing the order would inflate the wrong end of the series.

A flat rate is fine for a quick comparison. The CPI series is more accurate when inflation was uneven across your window — the 2021-2023 period being an obvious case. The calculator states which method produced the figure shown.

The index level for each year, in the same order and count as your earnings list — not the inflation percentage. Any consistent series works, since only the ratios between years are used. US CPI-U is published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Enter it as a negative number. This is precisely the case CAPE handles better than a plain P/E: one loss year makes an ordinary P/E meaningless, while the decade average absorbs it.

Yes — the calculator uses however many values you supply and reports the count. Fewer years means less cyclical smoothing, so the result sits closer to a plain P/E.

Put the EPS history in a column, add a second column multiplying each by (latest CPI ÷ that year's CPI), average that second column, and divide the price by the result. This page is that spreadsheet with the adjustment already wired up.

Divide the current share price by the estimated earnings per share for the next fiscal year. If a stock trades at $120 and the consensus estimate is $8.00, the forward P/E is 15. The only hard part is the estimate, not the arithmetic.

There is no threshold that works across companies. A forward P/E is interpretable only against the company's own history, its sector, and the growth implied by the estimate. On this page it is also shown against the inflation-adjusted decade average, which is far more informative than the multiple alone.

It depends entirely on what is growing behind it. Twenty-five times forward earnings is unremarkable for a business compounding earnings at 20% a year and expensive for one growing at 3%. It is also meaningless if the forward estimate sits far above what the company earns across a cycle — check the 'forward vs decade average' figure.

Neither alone. Forward P/E reflects expectations and is more relevant to a stable, growing business. CAPE reflects realized results across a cycle and is more relevant to a cyclical one. When the two disagree sharply, that disagreement is the finding — it usually means the forward estimate is far from the cycle average.

Because the denominator is a peak. Earnings are extraordinary, the forward estimate extrapolates them, and dividing the price by an inflated figure produces a low multiple. CAPE divides by a decade instead and reads much higher. This page shows both plus the ratio between the forward estimate and the cycle average, so the trap is visible rather than inferred.

Consensus estimates appear on most broker platforms and financial data sites, and companies often issue their own guidance in quarterly results. Use the next full fiscal year unless you have a reason to prefer another period — and remember it is a forecast, not a fact.

Systematically optimistic on average, and least reliable at cyclical turning points — which is exactly when the forward P/E is most likely to mislead. That is the case for looking at a decade of realized earnings alongside it rather than instead of it.

Yes. Set the forward EPS field to 0 and the forward figures are simply omitted; CAPE, trailing P/E and the earnings yield are unaffected.

There is no threshold that reliably signals a buy. The long-run US average is in the mid-teens, and high readings have historically been associated with weaker subsequent ten-year real returns. That is an association across a handful of overlapping periods, not a rule, and CAPE has stayed elevated for years at a time without a crash following.

Yes, and it is most informative for cyclical businesses — miners, homebuilders, chemicals, semiconductors — where a single year says little. It is least useful for young companies with no decade of history and for those whose business has fundamentally changed.

The reciprocal of CAPE. A CAPE of 25 gives 4%. It is often the more useful form because you can compare it directly with a bond yield rather than against another multiple.

Poorly. CAPE has been above its historical average for most of the last three decades. Investors who sold on that basis missed a great deal. It is better used to set return expectations than entry points.

With care. Index composition differs — a market dominated by banks will not carry the same multiple as one dominated by software — and accounting standards vary. Comparing a market with its own history is more defensible than comparing two markets with each other.

This page will not tell you, because the site holds no live market data by design. Robert Shiller publishes the authoritative US dataset free from Yale, and several sites chart it daily. Enter the current index level and earnings history here and you will reproduce the figure yourself.

Because there is no price or fundamentals feed behind this site. That keeps it private, fast and free of data that could silently go stale. The cost is that you supply the numbers — and the benefit is that you always know which numbers produced the answer.

It is the most substantive criticism of the metric. Write-down rules have changed in ways that arguably depress reported earnings relative to earlier decades, which would inflate a modern CAPE against its own history. There is no consensus adjustment, so treat the long-run average as context rather than a target.

Yes. Companies now return more through buybacks and retain more earnings than in earlier eras, which raises sustainable EPS growth and arguably justifies a permanently higher CAPE. This is a live argument among practitioners, not a settled correction.

No. Screening requires a fundamentals database across thousands of companies, which this site does not have and does not intend to build. This is a calculator for a company or index you are already looking at.

No. The calculation runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is transmitted, logged or stored, which you can confirm in your browser's network panel.