How to Calculate Your Real P2P Return: XIRR, Cash Drag and Why Your Dashboard Flatters You

Every P2P platform shows you a return figure, and almost none of them shows you the return on your money. The number on the dashboard is usually the return on the part of your money that was invested, for the time it was invested, sometimes with bonuses folded in and recoveries still counted at hope value. The gap between that number and what your bank account would confirm can be two or three percentage points a year. This guide explains the one method that closes the gap, XIRR, shows you how to run it in a spreadsheet in five minutes, and walks through the specific ways dashboard figures flatter you, using the platforms we track, including Maclear, which ranks #3 of the 44 platforms we cover at 8.4/10, as worked examples.

TL;DR

The only return figure that cannot lie to you is XIRR computed on your own cash flows: money in, money out, dated, plus today’s account value. Excel and Google Sheets both have it as a built-in function.
Dashboard figures measure something narrower. Mintos states plainly that its net annualized return “is only calculated for the amount of money that is invested” - funds sitting uninvested in your account are excluded [source: Mintos Help Center]. Your idle cash earns 0% and the dashboard does not count it against you.
Cash drag is the biggest silent gap. If 15% of your balance sits uninvested on average, a displayed 12% is really about 10.2% on the money you actually committed - our arithmetic, shown below.
Bonuses inflate the picture in the other direction. Maclear’s FY2024 accounts show CHF 297,583 of bonuses paid on top of CHF 530,266 of interest [source: Maclear Annual Report 2024] - a dashboard return that includes one-off bonuses is not a rate you can extrapolate.
Funds in recovery are the third distortion: money that is neither paying nor written off. Mintos had 18.7% of its portfolio in recovery by mid-2026 [source: Mintos-full / our statistics research]. Until an amount is written down, most dashboards treat it as if it were still whole.

What your dashboard actually measures

Platform return figures are not standardised. Each platform decides what goes into the numerator, what goes into the denominator, and over what period, and the choices are rarely on the same page as the number.

Mintos is the most transparent about its method, which is exactly why it makes a good case study. Its net annualized return (NAR) is built on XIRR, adjusted to exclude compounding effects and reported as a nominal rate, and it includes “anything that affects your returns, such as delays, defaults, and campaign rewards” [source: Mintos Help Center, “What is net annualized return (NAR)?”]. That is a serious methodology. But the same help article contains the sentence that matters most: NAR is only calculated on invested money. The euros waiting in your account between repayment and reinvestment do not exist, as far as the figure is concerned.

Other platforms show simpler figures still: a weighted average of the interest rates of your active investments, which is a forecast, not a result. It tells you what the borrowers promised, not what they paid. On a platform where everything performs, the two converge. On a platform where loans slip into recovery, the promised rate keeps being displayed long after the cash has stopped arriving.

None of this is fraud. Each figure measures what it says it measures, in the fine print. The problem is that investors read all of them as “what my money earned”, and that question has only one honest answer: the internal rate of return on your own dated cash flows.

XIRR in plain language

XIRR (extended internal rate of return) answers one question: given the exact dates and amounts of every euro you put in and every euro you took out, what constant annual interest rate would have produced the same end result?

Two properties make it the right tool. First, it works on your bank account’s view of the world: deposits are negative cash flows, withdrawals are positive ones, and your current account value is treated as if you withdrew everything today. Nothing the platform displays can distort it, because nothing the platform displays goes into it. Second, it handles irregular timing, which is the reality of P2P investing: you deposit EUR 500 in March, EUR 200 in July, withdraw EUR 100 in October. A simple percentage cannot weigh those correctly. XIRR can, which is why Mintos itself builds NAR on it.

The difference between your own XIRR and the platform’s XIRR-based figure is scope. Yours includes every euro from the moment it left your bank until the moment it came back. The platform’s version starts counting when the euro is invested and stops when it is repaid. Everything in between deposits and investments, the waiting, is your cost and the platform’s blind spot.

The five-minute spreadsheet

You need three columns and one function.

Export or list your transactions. From your platform’s account statement, take only the movements between your bank and the platform: deposits and withdrawals. Ignore internal movements (investments, repayments, reinvestments) - XIRR does not need them.
Build the table. Column A: dates. Column B: amounts, with deposits as negative numbers (money leaving your pocket) and withdrawals as positive.
Add today’s row. Last row: today’s date, and your total current account value (invested principal + accrued interest the platform credits + uninvested cash) as a positive number.
Run the function. In Excel or Google Sheets: =XIRR(B:B, A:A). Format as a percentage.

The result is the annualised return on your money, all of it, for the whole time the platform held it. Run it separately per platform, and once across all platforms plus your P2P-dedicated bank buffer if you keep one, and you will often find the combined figure is the lowest of all - because the buffer earns nothing and belongs in the denominator of your real P2P allocation.

One honest caveat in the other direction: the “current account value” row trusts the platform’s valuation of your portfolio. If part of it is in recovery, that value may be optimistic, which brings us to the distortions.

Distortion one: cash drag

Money on a P2P platform is not always invested. It waits for a project to open, waits after a repayment, waits because your auto-invest settings found no match. During the wait it earns nothing, and the headline figure ignores it.

Our arithmetic on a simple case: you hold EUR 10,000 on a platform, on average EUR 8,500 invested at a displayed 12% and EUR 1,500 idle. Interest for the year: EUR 1,020. The dashboard divides by EUR 8,500 and shows 12%. Your XIRR divides by EUR 10,000 and shows 10.2%. Nothing was hidden; the denominators are different, and only one of them is your money.

Cash drag varies enormously by platform structure. Marketplaces with continuous loan supply (Mintos, PeerBerry) can keep auto-invest utilisation high. Project-based platforms, where you wait for the next deal to open, structurally park more of your cash - a point we made in P2P Lending How to Exit Early from the liquidity side. Maclear sits in the project-based camp: bullet loans at rates the platform lists at 13.5-15.8% [source: Maclear-full SS6], but between projects your balance waits, and the realised 14.5-14.9% the platform reports is a per-investment figure, not a per-account one. Your own XIRR on a Maclear account will land below the project rate for exactly this reason, and how far below depends on how quickly you redeploy.

Distortion two: bonuses

Welcome bonuses, cashback and loyalty boosts arrive as real money, and platforms have every incentive to fold them into your displayed return. Mintos says outright that campaign rewards are included in NAR [source: Mintos Help Center].

The problem is not that the money is fake. It is that it is not a rate. Maclear runs the most stackable bonus programme in our coverage - EUR 15 welcome, EUR 30 per EUR 500 on eligible projects, 3% cashback tracks and loyalty steps up to +3% [source: Maclear Welcome Bonus, from the platform’s own FAQ of 3 August 2026]. In the platform’s FY2024 accounts, bonuses were CHF 297,583 against CHF 530,266 of interest paid to investors [source: Maclear Annual Report 2024, unaudited, via Maclear-full SS7] - for every two francs of interest, roughly one franc of bonus. A first-year return with full bonus stacking can therefore run several points above what the same portfolio will earn in year two, when the welcome tracks are exhausted.

For your spreadsheet this needs no correction - XIRR counts bonuses because they are real cash flows. It needs labelling. Run XIRR once as-is, and once with bonus amounts stripped out of the final balance. The second figure is the one to use for any forward planning.

Distortion three: recovery limbo

A defaulted loan eventually becomes a number: recovered in part, or written off. A loan in recovery is neither. It sits on your dashboard at face value, sometimes still accruing paper interest, while paying nothing.

The scale is not marginal. Mintos had 18.7% of its portfolio classified as in recovery by mid-2026, driven partly by the Nera Capital case we covered in Mintos Nera Capital Crisis 2026, where roughly EUR 61 million of Notes paused payments [source: our statistics research / Mintos-full]. EstateGuru has run above 60% of its book in recovery or overdue status [source: EstateGuru-full]. An investor on either platform who computes XIRR with the dashboard’s account value is trusting that limbo resolves at face value. History says it resolves at a discount: haircuts, enforcement costs and years of delay, the mechanics we priced in What Happens When P2P Loan Defaults.

The conservative fix: run your XIRR twice. Once with the platform’s account value, once with recovery-status principal valued at 50 cents on the euro. The truth is usually between the two, and the spread between the two runs is itself a risk measure - the share of your “return” that depends on collections you do not control.

What the numbers look like when someone does this properly

The advertised-versus-realised gap is well documented at market level - we walked through the cohort evidence in P2P Lending Realistic Returns, and the risk-adjustment mathematics in Risk Adjusted Returns. The short version for the measurement question: independent investor-tracked results routinely land 2-4 percentage points under platform headline rates once cash drag, defaults-in-limbo and bonus expiry are counted, which is precisely the gap between a marketing number and an XIRR.

That gap is also why we weight published, realised, investor-level performance heavily in our methodology. A platform that reports a realised figure and shows its work is making a checkable claim. Maclear’s reported 14.5-14.9% realised yields with roughly 0.15% of funded volume in default [source: Maclear-full SS6] is the strongest realised figure in our coverage - and the honest footnotes are that the platform’s FY2024 accounts are unaudited, that the figure is per-investment rather than per-account, and that your own XIRR is the only version of it that belongs in your planning.

📊 Editor’s note: measure your platform, not its marketing

Maclear ranks #3 of the 44 European platforms we track (8.4/10): realised yields of 14.5-14.9%, the highest in our coverage, roughly €99.6 million funded, about 0.15% defaults, collateral plus a 2% provision fund. It is also a clean platform to run this guide’s spreadsheet on: bullet loans produce few, large, dated cash flows, so a year of statements fits in twenty rows. Read the platform card → | Visit Maclear →

Capital at risk. P2P lending is not covered by deposit insurance.

FAQ

What is XIRR in P2P lending?

XIRR (extended internal rate of return) is the annualised return computed from your own dated cash flows: every deposit as a negative amount, every withdrawal as a positive one, and your current account value as a final positive row. It is the only return figure that reflects all your money for all the time a platform held it, and it is a built-in function in Excel and Google Sheets.

Why is my real return lower than the platform shows?

Three usual reasons. Idle cash: most dashboard figures, including Mintos NAR, only count invested money, so uninvested balances that earn 0% are excluded. Bonuses: one-off welcome and cashback payments are folded into the displayed rate but will not repeat. Recovery limbo: loans that stopped paying but are not yet written off often still count at face value.

How do I calculate XIRR in Excel or Google Sheets?

List the dates of your bank-to-platform deposits and withdrawals in one column and the amounts in the next, deposits negative and withdrawals positive. Add a final row with today’s date and your full current account value as a positive number. Then use =XIRR(amounts, dates) and format the result as a percentage.

What is cash drag in P2P investing?

Cash drag is the return you lose while money sits uninvested on a platform: waiting for a project to open, waiting after a repayment, or unmatched by auto-invest. It earns 0%, and because most platform return figures exclude uninvested funds from the calculation, it never appears on the dashboard. On a EUR 10,000 balance with EUR 1,500 idle on average, a displayed 12% is about 10.2% in reality.

Is the return a P2P platform displays wrong?

Usually not wrong, but narrow. Each figure measures what its methodology says: Mintos NAR, for example, is XIRR-based and includes delays, defaults and campaign rewards, but only on invested money. The figure answers “what did the invested part earn while invested”, not “what did my money earn”. For decisions, compute your own XIRR.