Free Depreciation Calculator Online

Calculate Depreciation Instantly: Straight-Line, Declining Balance, and More

A depreciation calculator answers one practical question: how much of an asset's value should you write down each year, and what is it worth on paper right now? This depreciation calculator takes three numbers — what you paid, what it will be worth when you're done with it, and how many years you expect to use it — and produces a full year-by-year schedule instantly, right in your browser, using whichever of three standard accounting methods fits your situation. There's no spreadsheet to build from scratch and no formula to remember.

Depreciation isn't just an accounting formality. It's how a business matches the cost of a long-lived asset — a delivery van, a laptop fleet, a piece of manufacturing equipment — to the years it actually helps generate revenue, instead of dumping the entire cost onto the year it was purchased. Getting a rough depreciation number quickly, without opening a full accounting package, is exactly what this calculator is built for.

How the Depreciation Calculator Works

The tool is a single form with a results table underneath it that updates as you go — nothing to submit, nothing to wait for:

1. Enter the Asset Cost, the amount you paid, or plan to pay, for the item.
2. Enter the Salvage value — what you expect the asset to be worth, or sell for, at the end of its useful life. Many assets, like a laptop nobody wants after five years, are given a salvage value of zero or close to it.
3. Enter the Life (years) — how many years you plan to use and depreciate the asset over.
4. Choose a method from the three toggle buttons above the results: Straight Line, Double Declining, or Sum of Years.
5. The results table updates the moment you change any field or method — one row for every year of the asset's life, showing that year's depreciation expense and the resulting book value.

Because the calculation reruns immediately, it's easy to flip between methods and watch how the same asset produces three different expense curves and three different book-value paths, without re-typing a single number.

Who Actually Needs to Calculate Depreciation

Depreciation shows up in more everyday decisions than the word "accounting" suggests:

• Small business owners buying equipment — an espresso machine, a delivery vehicle, a 3D printer — want a rough sense of how that purchase will hit their books over the next several years before it happens, not after a bookkeeper sends a report months later.
• Freelancers and sole proprietors tracking a laptop, camera, or other gear used for work often want to understand how its book value declines so they can budget for eventual replacement.
• Landlords and property managers depreciating appliances, HVAC units, or furnishings inside a rental unit want a quick estimate of remaining book value when deciding whether to repair or replace something.
• Students and career-changers studying accounting or finance use a calculator like this to check homework or build intuition for how straight-line and declining-balance methods diverge, instead of hand-computing a ten-row table with a pencil.
• Anyone selling a used business asset — a truck, a server rack, a piece of shop equipment — can use the book-value column to sanity-check whether a buyer's offer sits above or below where the asset "should" be on paper.

The Three Methods, and What Actually Happens to Book Value

All three methods start from the same two numbers — cost minus salvage value is the total amount that ever gets depreciated — but they spread that amount across the asset's life in very different shapes.

Straight-line is the simplest: divide cost minus salvage evenly by the number of years, and depreciate that same fixed amount every single year. A $50,000 asset with a $5,000 salvage value over five years depreciates exactly $9,000 a year, and book value falls in a perfectly straight diagonal line from cost down to salvage.

Double-declining balance applies a fixed rate — twice the straight-line rate, so 2 divided by the useful life — to whatever the current book value happens to be, not to the original cost. That means depreciation is largest in year one and shrinks every year after, front-loading the expense heavily. This calculator caps each year's depreciation so book value can never fall below the salvage value you entered; once the declining-balance math would push it lower, the tool depreciates only what's left down to salvage and effectively stops there.

Sum-of-years-digits is a middle ground: it weights each year by a fraction based on years remaining, so a five-year asset uses weights of 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1 out of a total of 15, front-loading depreciation more gently than double-declining balance while still moving faster than straight-line in the early years.

A Worked Example: $50,000 Asset, $5,000 Salvage, Five-Year Life

Feeding the calculator's built-in defaults through all three methods, side by side, makes clear exactly why the resulting numbers pull apart from one another. Straight-line depreciates a flat $9,000 every year, landing on book values of $41,000, $32,000, $23,000, $14,000, and finally $5,000. Double-declining balance front-loads much harder: $20,000 in year one, $12,000 in year two, $7,200 in year three, $4,320 in year four — and then something worth noticing happens in year five. The formula would normally call for $2,592 of depreciation that year, but book value is only $6,480 with a $5,000 salvage floor beneath it, so the calculator caps that year's depreciation at $1,480 instead, landing exactly on $5,000 rather than dropping past it. Sum-of-years-digits takes a smoother middle path — $15,000, $12,000, $9,000, $6,000, then $3,000 — arriving at the same $5,000 salvage value in year five without needing a cap, because its weighted fractions are built to land there naturally.

Year	Straight-Line Book Value	Double-Declining Book Value	Sum-of-Years Book Value
1	$41,000	$30,000	$35,000
2	$32,000	$18,000	$23,000
3	$23,000	$10,800	$14,000
4	$14,000	$6,480	$8,000
5	$5,000	$5,000	$5,000

Notice that all three methods converge on the same $5,000 ending book value, since all three are depreciating the same $45,000 total — they just disagree on how fast to get there. That's the entire practical difference between the methods in one table: same destination, different paths.

Method	Expense pattern	Best fits	Book value floor
Straight-line	Identical expense every year	Office furniture, buildings, assets that lose value evenly over time	Reaches salvage exactly in the final year
Double-declining balance	Large expense early, shrinking fast	Vehicles, computers, tech gear that loses most value early	Capped at salvage every year, never dips below it
Sum-of-years-digits	Moderate front-loading, smoother decline	Machinery with real but gradual early wear	Reaches salvage exactly in the final year

One limitation worth stating plainly: this is a general-purpose estimator, not a tax filing tool. Real-world tax depreciation — MACRS schedules in the United States, capital allowances in the United Kingdom, and comparable systems elsewhere — relies on fixed government tables, half-year conventions, and asset-class rules that don't line up exactly with any of these three textbook methods. Use this calculator to understand and estimate depreciation for budgeting, internal reporting, or coursework; bring in an accountant or tax software when a figure needs to go on an actual tax return.

Spreadsheets, Accounting Software, and Other Ways to Depreciate an Asset

• Spreadsheet functions. Excel and Google Sheets both ship with SLN() for straight-line, DDB() for declining balance, and SYD() for sum-of-years-digits, which is useful when the schedule needs to live inside a bigger financial model.
• Accounting software fixed-asset modules. QuickBooks, Xero, and similar platforms track depreciation automatically once an asset is entered, tying the numbers directly into your books and tax reports.
• A CPA or bookkeeper. For anything that touches an actual tax filing, a professional who knows the current MACRS tables or the local equivalent is the right call, not any online calculator.
• The API. Need these schedules generated inside your own app, spreadsheet macro, or internal tool instead of on this page? A metered API call handles the identical math — the API documentation spells out the expected request format and the per-call credit cost. Straight-line and declining-balance are both reachable through the endpoint; sum-of-years-digits currently runs on this page only.

Your Numbers Stay in Your Browser

Every field on this page — cost, salvage, life, and the method you pick — is processed with plain JavaScript running locally on your own device. Nothing you type is sent to a server, logged, or stored anywhere; the results table simply reflects a calculation done on the spot inside your browser tab. Close the tab and the numbers are gone with it. That makes it comfortable to run rough figures on a client's or employer's assets without worrying about where that information ends up afterward.

Common Depreciation Method Questions

What's the real difference between straight-line and declining-balance depreciation?

Straight-line spreads the exact same expense across every year, producing a book value that falls in a straight line from cost to salvage. Declining-balance methods, including double-declining balance here, apply a rate to the current book value each year, so the expense is largest early on and shrinks as the asset ages — closer to how a car or laptop actually loses resale value in practice.

Can an asset's book value ever drop below its salvage value?

Not in this calculator. The double-declining balance method is deliberately capped so each year's depreciation never exceeds the gap between current book value and salvage value; once book value reaches salvage, depreciation for that method effectively stops, matching standard accounting practice.

Which method should I pick for my situation?

Straight-line is the most common choice for financial reporting because it's simple and predictable to explain. Declining-balance methods are often used internally for assets — vehicles, electronics, machinery — that genuinely lose most of their usable value in the first few years. If you're filing taxes, the method and rate may be dictated by tax law rather than personal choice, which is a separate question from what this calculator estimates.

Does this calculator handle partial-year or mid-year purchases?

No, it assumes a full year of depreciation for each year of the asset's life, starting from year one. If your asset was placed in service partway through a calendar year, treat the first row as a rough approximation and adjust manually, or use accounting software that supports mid-year and half-year conventions.

What happens if I set the salvage value higher than the asset cost?

The math breaks down in a way that should be obvious from the results: there's effectively nothing left to depreciate, or the figures turn negative. A salvage value should always sit below the asset cost for the schedule to make practical sense.

Can I download or export the depreciation schedule?

Not directly from this page today; the table is built for on-screen reading and quick comparisons between methods. If you need the schedule saved to a file, recreate it in a spreadsheet using the same cost, salvage, and life inputs, or pull the figures through the API linked above.

Related Calculators

If the asset you're depreciating was financed rather than paid for outright, the loan calculator and the amortization schedule calculator break down the interest and principal side of that purchase. Comparing what the asset earns against what it cost overall works well with the ROI calculator, and if you're weighing a purchase now against a return spread over several future years, the investment return calculator handles that longer projection.