Fairvalue Radar / DCF calculator
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DCF calculator
Type a ticker and the cash flow, share count and net cash come straight from the company’s latest SEC filing. Set the growth and the discount rate yourself — get a fair value per share, and a grid showing how much that value moves when you are wrong.
A discounted cash flow projects the cash a business will produce in future years and discounts each year back to what it is worth today. The sum of those discounted amounts, plus a terminal value for everything after the forecast, is the value of the business.
Load a company from its latest SEC filing
Fair value per share
Fair value against price
Watch the orange shrink as a share of each bar. That is discounting: the further away the money is, the less it is worth now.
Where the valuation comes from
Read the spread, not the middle cell. If the corners of this grid are far apart, the honest conclusion is that a DCF cannot price this business tightly — and no amount of decimal places changes that.
Getting the inputs right
Six decisions, in order
The arithmetic is trivial. Every bit of difficulty is in these six numbers.
- Start from free cash flow, not profitOperating cash flow minus capital expenditure, from the cash flow statement. Use a normal year. If last year had a huge one-off, use the year before or an average.
- Split growth into two stagesA single growth rate for a decade is a fantasy. Give years one to five the rate the business is actually doing now, and fade years six to ten towards something ordinary.
- Keep terminal growth between 1% and 3%This is the rate the business grows at forever. Set it above long-run economic growth and you have implied the company eventually becomes the entire economy.
- Pick a discount rate you would actually acceptIt is the annual return you require for the risk. 8–12% is a normal band for an established listed company. Higher rate, lower value — that is the point of it.
- Adjust for the balance sheetThe projection values the operating business. Add net cash, or subtract net debt, to get to what the equity is worth. Then divide by shares outstanding, diluted.
- Break it on purposeMove the discount rate a point either way. Move terminal growth half a point. If the answer swings by a third, you have learned something more useful than the answer.
Honest limits
What a DCF is good at, and what it is not
Works well
Established businesses with cash flow you could have predicted five years ago. Utilities, mature industrials, consumer staples, dominant software with contracted revenue.
It also works well as a discipline even when the output is wide — it forces you to write down what you are actually assuming about growth, and to see it next to a number.
Breaks down
Negative or erratic free cash flow. Early-stage companies. Banks and insurers, where the cash flow statement does not mean what it means elsewhere. Cyclicals caught at the top or bottom of a cycle.
And any case where the terminal value carries most of the answer — then you are not valuing a decade of trading, you are valuing a guess about forever.
This is why Fairvalue Radar never prices a business on a DCF alone. It runs four methods and reconciles them, with net asset value acting as the floor when the earnings case falls apart.
Questions people ask
DCF, in plain terms
What is a DCF calculation?
A discounted cash flow projects the cash a business will produce in future years and discounts each year back to what it is worth today. The sum of those discounted amounts, plus a terminal value for everything after the forecast, is the value of the business.
What discount rate should I use in a DCF?
The discount rate is the annual return you require for taking the risk. For an established listed company, 8 to 12 percent is a common range. A higher rate means you demand more compensation for uncertainty, and it produces a lower fair value.
What is a reasonable terminal growth rate?
Between 1 and 3 percent. Terminal growth is the rate the business grows at forever, so it cannot exceed long-run economic growth without implying the company eventually becomes the whole economy. It must also stay below the discount rate or the formula breaks.
Why do two people get different DCF values for the same company?
Because a DCF is mostly assumptions. Growth rate, terminal growth and discount rate are all judgements, and small changes to any of them move the answer a long way. The sensitivity grid on this page shows exactly how far.
When should you not use a DCF?
When free cash flow is negative or wildly erratic, when the business is early stage, or when most of the value sits in assets rather than earnings. In those cases a net asset value or a multiples approach carries more information than a projection would.
Is this DCF calculator free?
Yes, and it runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is sent to a server or stored. It is free to use without an account, and there is no limit on how many times you run it.
Last updated 29 August 2026
A DCF is one of four methods. Fairvalue Radar will run all four on SEC filings, reconcile them into one number, then score the business against ten criteria. That part is still being built — this calculator and the tool comparison are what is finished today.
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