Enter a balance and a fund's yearly fee to see the ending balance with and without it, and the fee the fund actually took each year.
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An expense ratio is an annual percentage of the assets you hold, accrued daily and taken out of fund earnings, so the account never shows you a line item. This tool charges it once a year: the fee for a year is that year's opening balance times the ratio, and the balance then grows at the gross return minus the ratio. Compounded, the ending balance is the starting amount times (1 + (gross return - expense ratio) divided by 100) raised to the number of years, and the no-fee figure is the same sum grown at the full gross return.
The gap between those two endings is not the sum of the fees. It is the fees plus every dollar of growth those fee dollars would have earned later. The right-hand column below is cash that actually left the account; the gap is what the account ended up missing, and once the term is long the gap is always the larger number.
Defaults: $50,000, 7% gross, a 0.80% ratio, 30 years. With the fee the balance ends at $303,882.37; without it, $380,612.75. The ratio costs $76,730.38 of ending balance, so the charged version ends 20.2% lower.
Fees actually charged over those 30 years total $32,759.02: $400.00 in year one - the first-year price tag of a 0.80% ratio on a $50,000 balance is $400.00 a year - rising to $2,289.13 in year 30 once the balance has grown past $286,000. The other $43,971.37 of the $76,730.38 gap is growth the fee dollars never got to earn.
Same inputs, 10 years: $91,246.28 with the fee against $98,357.57 without, a gap of $7,111.29 on fees charged of $5,322.10. The gap outruns the fee bill as the term lengthens.
It assumes the ratio is the whole cost. Loads, 12b-1 fees, transaction and options costs inside actively managed funds, and the bid/ask spread on an ETF all sit outside this figure. It assumes the ratio never changes, which is not true across share classes, and it assumes a balance you neither add to nor withdraw.
It ignores tax. In a taxable account a low-fee fund that rarely turns over can beat a nominally cheaper one that distributes gains every December, and in a traditional IRA or 401(k) the tax difference disappears while the fee difference does not.
Browser-only arithmetic; nothing you type is sent anywhere. A lower expense ratio is one of the few costs you can control, but it is not a promise: fees buy management, and some of it is worth paying for. No fund is recommended here.