Earned Value Calculator (EVM)

Earned Value Management (EVM) measures a project’s true health by comparing what you planned to accomplish, what you actually accomplished, and what it actually cost — all in the same money units. This earned value calculator takes the planned value, earned value, actual cost and budget at completion at any status date and returns the cost and schedule variances, the CPI and SPI performance indices, the percent complete and spent, a plain-language verdict on whether the project is over or under budget and ahead of or behind schedule, and a headline forecast of the final cost. Enter your four numbers above and read where the project really stands.

What the earned value calculator computes

EVM integrates scope, schedule and cost into a single set of numbers, which is what makes it more honest than tracking spend against budget alone. The reason is simple: comparing actual cost to planned cost tells you whether you have spent what you expected, but not whether you got the work done for it. A project that has spent exactly its budget could be perfectly on track, or it could be badly behind having achieved only half the planned work at full price. EVM resolves the ambiguity by introducing a third number — the value of the work actually completed — and measuring everything against it.

This tool takes the three core measurements plus the total budget and returns the full status picture: cost variance and schedule variance in money terms, the cost and schedule performance indices as efficiency ratios, the percent of the budget completed and spent, and a headline forecast of the total cost at completion. It colour-codes the indices so that a healthy value is green and a troubled one is red, and it states the project’s status in words. Those outputs are exactly what a status report, a steering-committee slide or a project-management exam requires.

The three core measurements: PV, EV and AC

Planned value (PV), sometimes called the budgeted cost of work scheduled, is the budgeted cost of the work that should have been completed by the status date according to the baseline plan. It is where the plan said you would be. Earned value (EV), the budgeted cost of work performed, is the budgeted cost of the work that has actually been completed by the status date — the value you have genuinely earned, measured at the baseline prices. Actual cost (AC), the actual cost of work performed, is simply what has really been spent to complete that work.

The key to EVM is that earned value is measured at budgeted prices, not actual ones, so that EV and PV are directly comparable as schedule measures and EV and AC are directly comparable as cost measures. If a task budgeted at 100 is half done, its earned value is 50 regardless of what the half actually cost. That single convention is what lets the method separate a cost problem from a schedule problem, which no simple spend-versus-budget comparison can do. The fourth input, the budget at completion (BAC), is the total baseline budget for the whole project and anchors the percentages and the forecast.

Cost variance and schedule variance

The two variances translate the raw measurements into a verdict. Cost variance is earned value minus actual cost, the money difference between the value of the work done and what it cost:

CV = EV − AC    SV = EV − PV

A positive cost variance means the work was done for less than its budgeted value — the project is under budget. A negative cost variance means it cost more than budgeted — over budget. Schedule variance is earned value minus planned value, the money difference between the value earned and the value that should have been earned by now.

A positive schedule variance means more value has been earned than planned — ahead of schedule; a negative one means less — behind schedule. Both are expressed in money because earned value is a money quantity, which is why schedule variance is a currency figure rather than a number of days, a point that surprises newcomers and is worth internalising.

The performance indices: CPI and SPI

The variances tell you the direction and size of the problem in absolute money; the indices tell you the efficiency as a ratio, which makes projects of different sizes comparable. The cost performance index is earned value divided by actual cost, and the schedule performance index is earned value divided by planned value:

CPI = EV / AC    SPI = EV / PV

A CPI of 1.0 means you are getting exactly a dollar of value for every dollar spent; above 1.0 is efficient, below 1.0 is over-spending. A CPI of 0.8 means you are getting only eighty cents of value per dollar, a serious cost overrun. The SPI reads the same way against the plan: 1.0 is on schedule, above is ahead, below is behind. An SPI of 0.9 means you have accomplished ninety percent of the value you planned to by now. Because they are dimensionless ratios, the indices are the numbers most often quoted in status reports and are the ones the calculator colours green or red so the health of the project is visible at a glance.

Worked examples

Example 1 — the built-in status. The example loads a project with a planned value of 1,000, an earned value of 800, an actual cost of 1,200 and a total budget of 4,000. The cost variance is 800 − 1,200 = −400, and the schedule variance is 800 − 1,000 = −200, so the project is both over budget and behind schedule.

The CPI is 800 / 1,200 = 0.67 and the SPI is 800 / 1,000 = 0.80: the team is getting only sixty-seven cents of value per dollar and has earned only eighty percent of the planned value. The project is twenty percent complete but has already spent thirty percent of the budget. This is a project in real trouble on both fronts, and the calculator says so in words and colour.

Press “Load example” to see it.

Example 2 — a healthy project. Suppose planned value, earned value and actual cost are all equal at a status date — say 500 each against a 1,000 budget. Then both variances are zero and both indices are exactly 1.0: the project is precisely on budget and on schedule, halfway to earning its budget. Any divergence of earned value above the other two is good news, and below is a warning. Feeding in different combinations quickly builds intuition for how the four quadrants — over or under budget, ahead of or behind schedule — show up in the numbers.

Example 3 — over budget but ahead of schedule. Consider planned value 400, earned value 500, actual cost 450, budget 1,000. Schedule variance is +100 and SPI is 1.25, so the project is well ahead of schedule; cost variance is +50 and CPI is about 1.11, so it is also under budget. This is the best quadrant, and it illustrates that the two dimensions are independent: a project can be ahead on one and behind on the other, which is exactly the insight EVM exists to provide and which spend-versus-budget tracking cannot.

Percent complete and percent spent

Two ratios against the total budget round out the picture. Percent complete is earned value divided by budget at completion, the fraction of the total planned value that has been earned so far. Percent spent is actual cost divided by budget at completion, the fraction of the budget consumed. Comparing the two is a quick health check: if you have spent thirty percent of the budget but earned only twenty percent of the value, you are burning money faster than you are producing results, which is the signature of a cost overrun. When percent complete leads percent spent, the project is efficient. The calculator reports both so the comparison is immediate.

Forecasting the final cost

The most valuable question EVM answers is forward-looking: given performance so far, what will the whole project finally cost? The headline forecast, the estimate at completion, assumes the cost efficiency seen to date continues for the rest of the work:

EAC = BAC / CPI    VAC = BAC − EAC

If the budget is 4,000 and the CPI is 0.67, the forecast final cost is 4,000 / 0.67 = 6,000 — a fifty percent overrun, and the variance at completion is 4,000 − 6,000 = −2,000. This single formula is the fastest early warning a project has: a CPI below one, projected forward, quantifies the overrun long before it lands.

The calculator also reports the to-complete performance index, the cost efficiency the remaining work must achieve to still finish within the original budget; when that number is well above the current CPI, hitting the budget has become unrealistic. These forecasts assume the past predicts the future, which is a strong assumption.

There are several other EAC formulas for different situations — remaining work at the planned rate, or weighted by both cost and schedule performance — and the dedicated Estimate at Completion calculator in this silo works through all of them; this tool gives the single most-used forecast as a headline.

How to read the results

Read the verdict line first: it states in plain words whether the project is over or under budget and ahead of or behind schedule. Then read the two indices, which are colour-coded — green when at or above one, red when below — so a troubled dimension jumps out. The cost and schedule variances give the size of each problem in money.

The percent-complete and percent-spent figures show how far along the project is and whether spend is outpacing progress. The forecast and variance at completion translate current performance into a projected final cost, and the to-complete index says how hard the remaining work would have to be to recover.

The chart compares planned value, earned value and actual cost as three bars, the clearest single picture of a project’s status. Export the numbers to CSV for a report or save the page as a PDF for a review.

Reading the PV, EV and AC chart

The three-bar chart is the most compact way to see a project’s status, and once you learn to read it the whole picture arrives at a glance. Planned value is the reference bar: it is where the baseline said you would be. Earned value sits beside it, and the gap between earned and planned value is the schedule variance made visual — an earned-value bar shorter than planned means work is behind, taller means ahead.

Actual cost is the third bar, and the gap between earned value and actual cost is the cost variance — an actual-cost bar taller than earned value means the work cost more than its budgeted worth. The single most telling pattern is the relationship of the earned-value bar to the other two: when it is the shortest of the three, as in the built-in example, the project has both earned less than planned and spent more than it earned, the double-trouble signature of a project behind and over budget.

Presenting this chart in a status meeting communicates in seconds what a table of indices takes minutes to explain, which is why it is the visual every earned-value report leads with.

Interpreting the four quadrants

Because cost and schedule performance are independent, every project falls into one of four quadrants at any status date, and each calls for a different response. Under budget and ahead of schedule is the ideal, though a very high SPI early can also signal that the baseline was padded.

Under budget but behind schedule often means the team is understaffed — cheap because too little is being done — and the fix is usually to add resources, accepting some cost to recover time. Over budget but ahead of schedule is the opposite: the work is being pushed hard and fast at a premium, which may be exactly right against a firm deadline or may be uncontrolled spending.

Over budget and behind schedule, the worst quadrant, demands immediate intervention because both dimensions are failing at once. Naming the quadrant is the first step in choosing the response, and the two indices place the project in it precisely.

What earned value adds over spend-versus-budget tracking

The traditional way to track a project is to compare actual cost against the budget for the period, and it is dangerously incomplete. Suppose a project budgeted to spend 1,000 by a status date has actually spent 1,000: on the traditional view it is perfectly on track.

But if only 600 worth of work has been completed, the project has a serious problem that the spend comparison entirely hides — it is over budget on a value basis and behind schedule, with a CPI and SPI both around 0.6. Earned value catches this because it asks not merely whether the money was spent but whether the work was done for it.

The addition of a single measurement, the value of completed work, is what turns a blind spend-tracking exercise into a genuine performance-measurement system, and it is why government agencies and large contractors mandate EVM on major programmes.

The S-curve and the status date

EVM is usually visualised as three curves rising over time: planned value follows the classic S-curve of the baseline, and earned value and actual cost are plotted against it as the project progresses.

At any status date, the vertical gaps between the curves are the variances — the gap between EV and PV is schedule variance, the gap between EV and AC is cost variance — and the whole history of the project’s health can be read from how the three curves diverge.

This calculator works at a single status date, which is how EVM is applied in practice: you take a snapshot of PV, EV and AC as of a cut-off, compute the indices, and compare them to the previous period to see whether performance is improving or deteriorating. Tracking the indices over successive status dates is more informative than any single reading, because the trend reveals whether corrective action is working.

Measuring earned value in practice

The hardest part of EVM is not the arithmetic but honestly measuring earned value, because it requires judging how much of each in-progress task is really done. Several conventions exist to keep that judgement disciplined.

The fixed-formula methods assign credit at milestones: the 0/100 rule earns nothing until a task is fully complete, useful for short tasks where partial credit would be misleading, while the 50/50 rule earns half the value when a task starts and the rest when it finishes. Percent-complete estimates let the person doing the work state a completion fraction, which is flexible but open to optimism. Weighted milestones break a long task into checkpoints each worth a defined share of the value.

Whichever method is used, the golden rule is to measure earned value the same way it was budgeted and to resist inflating progress, because an overstated earned value flatters the indices and hides exactly the problems EVM exists to reveal. The calculator assumes you have already measured EV honestly; its output is only as trustworthy as that input.

A limitation of schedule variance to understand

Schedule variance and SPI have a well-known quirk worth understanding: they are measured in money, not time, and they always converge to zero and one respectively at the end of the project. That is because at completion the earned value equals the planned value equals the budget — all the planned work has been earned — so schedule variance vanishes and SPI returns to one even for a project that finished catastrophically late.

Near the end of a project, therefore, SPI stops being a reliable schedule indicator and understates how late things are. The cost indices do not share this flaw. For a schedule metric that behaves sensibly right to the end, the earned-schedule technique converts earned value into time units, but the classic SV and SPI on this page remain the standard first measures and are exactly what the certifications teach.

Knowing their end-of-project behaviour keeps you from being lulled by an SPI drifting back toward one.

Common mistakes when applying EVM

The most damaging error is overstating earned value, because it flatters every index and hides the very problems the method exists to catch; measure completion honestly and against the same rule used to budget the work. A second is treating SPI as a reliable schedule measure late in the project, when it drifts toward one regardless of lateness; use the trend of SPI over earlier periods, or an earned-schedule measure, rather than a single late reading.

A third is confusing actual cost with committed cost — money that is contracted but not yet incurred should be reflected consistently, or CPI will swing misleadingly as invoices land. A fourth is measuring earned value against a stale baseline after scope has changed without re-baselining, which makes both variances meaningless. A fifth is reading a single status date in isolation; EVM is most powerful as a trend, and one snapshot cannot tell you whether performance is improving or getting worse.

Avoiding these keeps the indices trustworthy.

Combining earned value with the critical path

Earned value and the critical path answer different questions, and reading them together is far more informative than either alone. Earned value tells you the aggregate cost and schedule health of the whole project in money terms; the critical path tells you which specific activities are driving the finish date. A project can show a healthy SPI while a critical-path activity is slipping, because earned value on non-critical work can mask a delay on the path that actually matters — this is precisely the blind spot behind SPI’s end-of-project drift.

The disciplined practice is to use earned value for the high-level cost-and-schedule dashboard and the critical-path analysis for the detailed schedule diagnosis, letting each cover the other’s weakness. When SPI dips, the critical path shows whether the delay is on work that threatens the deadline or on activities with float; when the critical path is under pressure, earned value quantifies what recovering it is costing.

The Critical Path calculator in this silo produces the schedule side of that pairing, and using the two in tandem is how experienced managers read a project.

Where earned value is used

EVM is the backbone of performance measurement on large, cost-reimbursable and government projects, where it is frequently a contractual requirement — defence, aerospace, major construction and public infrastructure programmes routinely mandate a compliant EVM system.

But the same three measurements scale down cleanly: any project with a cost baseline and a way to judge completed work can compute CPI and SPI, and doing so on even a modest project catches cost and schedule problems earlier than intuition would.

It is a staple of project-management education, and the PV/EV/AC measurements, the variances, the indices and the EAC forecast on this page are precisely what the PMP and CAPM examinations expect candidates to compute and interpret. Wherever a project must report honestly on both cost and schedule at once, earned value is the common language.

The method also scales by ambition rather than only by size. A team new to earned value can start with a single project-level reading of the four numbers, exactly what this calculator computes, and graduate to control-account-level measurement as the discipline takes hold.

What matters is not the sophistication of the system but the honesty of the earned-value measurement and the consistency of taking readings period after period, so the trend of CPI and SPI becomes visible.

Even one well-measured status date is more informative than a spend report; a series of them is a genuine early-warning system that turns cost and schedule trouble into something you see coming rather than something that arrives.

Percentage variances and the combined index

The absolute variances are often restated as percentages to make them comparable across projects and periods. The cost variance percentage is the cost variance divided by earned value, and the schedule variance percentage is the schedule variance divided by planned value; a cost variance of −400 on an earned value of 800 is a fifty-percent cost overrun, a far more alarming figure than the raw number suggests on a small project.

Some organisations also track a combined critical-ratio or cost-schedule index, the product of CPI and SPI, as a single number that falls when either dimension slips; a value below one flags a project that is failing on cost, schedule, or both.

These derived figures add nothing the CPI and SPI do not already contain, but they package the same information in ways that suit different audiences, and knowing how they are built keeps you from being confused when a status report quotes them.

The performance measurement baseline

Earned value only means something against a sound baseline, and setting that baseline well is the real prerequisite for the method. The performance measurement baseline is the time-phased budget: the scope broken into work packages, each with a budget and a scheduled period, which together define the planned-value curve. If the baseline is padded, every index will look flatteringly high; if it is unrealistic, the indices will look alarming even when the team is doing well.

This is why EVM is usually paired with a work breakdown structure that decomposes the project into measurable pieces, and why changes to scope must flow through formal change control that re-baselines the budget — otherwise earned value is being measured against a plan that no longer exists.

The calculator assumes your PV, EV and BAC all come from the same, current baseline; if a scope change has been approved but not yet baselined, the indices will mislead until the plan is updated.

A step-by-step walkthrough of the example

Take the built-in numbers and compute the whole picture by hand once. Planned value is 1,000, earned value 800, actual cost 1,200, budget 4,000.

Start with the variances: cost variance is earned value minus actual cost, 800 − 1,200 = −400, so the project is 400 over budget on the work done so far; schedule variance is earned value minus planned value, 800 − 1,000 = −200, so it has earned 200 less value than the plan called for. Now the indices:

CPI is 800 / 1,200 = 0.667, meaning each dollar spent has produced only sixty-seven cents of budgeted value; SPI is 800 / 1,000 = 0.80, meaning eighty percent of the planned value has been earned. The percentages against the 4,000 budget are twenty percent complete (800 / 4,000) and thirty percent spent (1,200 / 4,000), confirming that spend is running ahead of progress.

Forecasting, the estimate at completion is 4,000 / 0.667 = 6,000, so at the current rate the project will overrun by 2,000, and the to-complete index needed to still hit 4,000 is (4,000 − 800) / (4,000 − 1,200) = 3,200 / 2,800 = 1.14 — the remaining work would have to run at a CPI of 1.14 when it has managed only 0.67 so far, which is plainly unrealistic.

Every figure the calculator shows is reproduced by this arithmetic, and doing it once makes the automated output far easier to trust.

Earned value in agile and hybrid projects

EVM is often assumed to belong only to heavyweight plan-driven programmes, but its logic adapts to agile delivery with a little translation. In an agile project the budget at completion is the total funding, planned value is the value of the story points or features scheduled by the status date, and earned value is the budgeted value of the points actually accepted as done.

Because agile has a strict definition of done, earned value is arguably cleaner to measure there than on traditional projects, where partial credit invites optimism. CPI and SPI then read exactly as before, giving an agile programme an objective cost-and-schedule health check that burn-up and burn-down charts alone do not provide. Hybrid projects, which plan at the milestone level while executing iteratively, apply earned value at the milestone level naturally.

The method is about measuring value against plan and cost, and any delivery approach that can define those three quantities can use it.

A brief history of earned value

Earned value has industrial roots going back to the cost accounting of the late nineteenth century, but its modern form was codified by the US Department of Defense in 1967 as the cost/schedule control systems criteria, a set of thirty-five standards that major contractors had to meet. For decades it lived mainly in defence and aerospace, where its discipline was mandated on large cost-reimbursable contracts.

In the 1990s the criteria were rewritten by industry into the lighter earned value management system guidelines, and the technique spread into the wider project-management profession as the PMBOK Guide adopted it. Today it is both a contractual requirement on major public programmes and a standard part of the project-management body of knowledge, taught to every certification candidate.

Its longevity comes from the durability of its central insight — that you cannot judge a project without measuring the value of what has actually been done.

A short glossary of earned value terms

PV (planned value) — budgeted cost of work scheduled by the status date. EV (earned value) — budgeted cost of work actually performed. AC (actual cost) — actual cost of work performed. BAC (budget at completion) — total baseline budget. CV (cost variance) — EV − AC. SV (schedule variance) — EV − PV. CPI — cost performance index, EV/AC. SPI — schedule performance index, EV/PV. EAC (estimate at completion) — forecast total cost, here BAC/CPI. ETC (estimate to complete) — forecast remaining cost, EAC − AC. VAC (variance at completion) — BAC − EAC. TCPI (to-complete performance index) — efficiency needed on remaining work to hit a target. Keeping these straight is most of what it takes to read any earned-value report with confidence.

How to use this calculator

Enter four numbers in consistent money units: the planned value (the budgeted cost of the work scheduled by the status date), the earned value (the budgeted cost of the work actually completed), the actual cost (what has really been spent), and the budget at completion (the total project budget). Press calculate, or press “Load example” to populate a worked status.

Read the verdict line and the colour-coded indices first, then the variances, the percentages and the forecast. Export the result to CSV or PDF for your status report. Take a fresh reading at each reporting period and compare the indices to the previous one — the trend matters more than any single value.

For the deeper forecasting question of what the project will finally cost under different assumptions, follow the link to the Estimate at Completion calculator, which extends the headline EAC shown here into the full family of forecasting formulas.

Five worked examples of earned value

Example 1: the three base numbers

Planned value (PV) = 10,000 of work should be done; earned value (EV) = 8,000 of work actually completed; actual cost (AC) = 9,000 spent. These three drive every earned-value metric.

Example 2: cost variance

CV = EV − AC = 8,000 − 9,000 = −1,000. Negative means over budget: the work done was worth 8,000 but cost 9,000.

Example 3: schedule variance

SV = EV − PV = 8,000 − 10,000 = −2,000. Negative means behind schedule: only 8,000 of the planned 10,000 of work is complete.

Example 4: the performance indices

CPI = EV ÷ AC = 8,000 ÷ 9,000 = 0.89; SPI = EV ÷ PV = 8,000 ÷ 10,000 = 0.80. Both below 1.0 confirm the project is over cost and behind schedule.

Example 5: a healthy project

If EV 11,000, PV 10,000, AC 10,500: CV = +500, SV = +1,000, CPI = 1.05, SPI = 1.10 — ahead of schedule and under budget. Indices above 1.0 are the goal.

Three expert tips for earned value

Earn value by rules, not opinion

Decide up front how EV is credited (0/100, 50/50, or % complete) and apply it consistently. Optimistic “percent complete” guesses are the fastest way to corrupt the metrics.

Read cost and schedule together

A project can be under budget only because it is behind schedule (little spent because little done). Always look at CPI and SPI side by side, not either alone.

Use the indices to forecast

CPI and SPI aren’t just status — they feed the estimate at completion. A CPI of 0.89 sustained means the final cost will run about 12% over budget unless performance changes.

Frequently asked questions

Sources, disclaimer and editorial transparency

This calculator applies the standard earned-value formulas: CV = EV − AC, SV = EV − PV, CPI = EV/AC, SPI = EV/PV, percent complete = EV/BAC, percent spent = AC/BAC, the headline forecast EAC = BAC/CPI, VAC = BAC − EAC, and TCPI = (BAC − EV)/(BAC − AC) to meet the budget. This is consistent with standard project-management references such as the PMBOK Guide and the practice standard for earned value management. This calculator and guide are created and reviewed by the OpsCalculators team; see our Editorial Policy for how each tool is researched, built, and tested.

Results are accurate estimates for planning and education, not certified project-controls advice, and the forecast assumes cost efficiency to date continues for the remaining work. Measure earned value the same way it was budgeted, and read SPI cautiously near project completion, where it drifts toward one regardless of lateness. OpsCalculators.com is operated by MAFHH INTERNATIONAL LTD. Your data is processed in your browser and never stored; see our Privacy Policy.