Bond calculator
A 10-year bond with a 5% coupon is worth $925.61 per $1,000 when yields are 6%, and exactly $1,000 when they are 5%. Price and yield move in opposite directions and never in proportion: the same bond is $857.88 at 7%, so the second point of yield cost $67.73 against the first point’s $74.39. That curvature is what duration — 7.9 years here — only approximates.
Price from yield or yield from price, in either direction, with current yield and Macaulay duration beside them — and the amount the price moves if yields rise a point.
Method checked against the published discounting conventions · How we check
Price
$925.61
Trading at a discount — $74.39 below face value, because the market yield beats the coupon.
- Price
- $925.61
- Price per 100 of face
- 92.561
- Yield to maturity
- 6.000%
- Current yield
- 5.402%
- Coupon each payment
- $25.00
- Total coupons to maturity
- $500.00
- Macaulay duration
- 7.89 years
- If yields rise 1%, price
- $857.88
Current yield is the coupon over the price and ignores the pull to par, so it differs from yield to maturity whenever the bond is not at par — here by 0.598 percentage points. Duration says how far the price moves for a change in yield: this one loses about $67.74 if yields rise a point.
Questions people actually ask
- How do you calculate the price of a bond?
- Discount every coupon and the face value back at the yield, then add them: price = C × (1 − (1 + y)⁻ⁿ) ÷ y + F ÷ (1 + y)ⁿ, with C the coupon per period, y the yield per period and n the number of periods. Both are per period, so a semi-annual bond halves the annual figures and doubles the count.
- Why does a bond price fall when yields rise?
- Because the coupons are fixed. If the market now pays 6% and this bond pays 5%, the only way it can yield 6% to a new buyer is to cost less — the discount makes up the difference. That is the whole mechanism, and duration says how much less.
- What is the difference between current yield and yield to maturity?
- Current yield is the coupon divided by the price and stops there. Yield to maturity also counts the gain or loss from the price returning to face value at maturity, so at a discount YTM exceeds current yield and at a premium it falls short. Only YTM is comparable between bonds.
- What is duration for?
- Estimating what a change in rates does to the price. Macaulay duration is the weighted average time to the cash flows, in years, and a bond with a duration of eight loses roughly 8% of its value if yields rise a point. It is always shorter than maturity for a coupon bond, and equal to maturity for a zero.
- Why is yield to maturity solved rather than calculated?
- Because the price equation cannot be rearranged for the yield — it is a polynomial of degree n. Given a price, the yield has to be found numerically. This page brackets it and bisects, and the check is that feeding the answer back in reproduces the price you entered.
Cite this page
- APA
- Rule Calculator. (2026). Bond Calculator. Rule Calculator. https://rulecalculators.com/bond
- MLA
- "Bond Calculator." Rule Calculator, August 16, 2026, https://rulecalculators.com/bond.
- Chicago
- Rule Calculator. "Bond Calculator." Rule Calculator. Last reviewed August 16, 2026. https://rulecalculators.com/bond.
The date is when the figures on this page were last checked against their source, not the day you opened it. Add your own access date if your style needs one.
Sources
- SEC investor.gov — bonds, how price and yield move against each other
- TreasuryDirect — how Treasury auction prices, yields and coupons relate
- NIST Handbook 135 — discounting and present-value methodology
Arithmetic on the figures you enter, not investment advice.