The Business School ROI Calculator 2025-26

The key question in deciding whether to pursue an MBA — is it worth it — got a little trickier this year: The degrees became less profitable and more costly at US schools, Bloomberg data show. This tool uses a standard measure of financial success to help you decide for yourself: profit relative to initial principal, or return on investment. Respond to the questions to get a net 10-year ROI (in dollars) and an annualized ROI percentage. For each question, you can either accept the default or median (based on Bloomberg surveys of graduates of US business schools) or change it with the slider. If you haven’t decided on a school, no worries: Move on to the questions without selecting one.

How the schools compare

Let’s do the numbers

Here’s the bottom line: The investment you’re making to get an MBA exceeds your estimated gross return, based on the numbers entered. The resulting ROI cannot be calculated.

To reach that conclusion, we made some assumptions about the decade after graduation: Future inflation will reduce the effective interest rate on any student loans, the real value of any signing bonus invested in the markets and the impact of annual raises. We also assumed that those raises would be bigger with an MBA than without one. For more details, hover over the information icons below and read our methodology ↓.

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Methodology

The Bloomberg Businessweek return-on-investment tool for business schools relies on a standard calculation for measuring financial success: profit relative to initial principal. Say you bought $10,000 worth of rutabaga futures and sold them 10 years later for $70,000. Your profit would be $60,000, and your net ROI would be $60,000 divided by $10,000, or 600%. To get an annualized average for that figure, we need to account for the principal’s compounding growth. That’s a two-step calculation:

1. First, divide the final principal by the initial capital to get the gross return-to-investment ratio: $70,000 / $10,000 = 7

2. Next, raise that ratio to the power of one-tenth (for 10 years) and then subtract 100% (or 1) to get the annualized, compounded ROI: 7 ^ (1/10) - 100% = 21.5%

To show how that works in practice, here’s what that principal would look like over the investment’s 10-year life:

We applied the same concept to the money spent getting an MBA and the potential payoff. For the investment, we included these items, as reported by the user of the calculator:

• Tuition, room, board and any other living expenses while out of the full-time workforce
• Forgone income over the months spent attending school and any additional time out of the full-time workforce, based on pre-MBA salary, minus any money earned while at school from internships or other jobs.
• Interest on any student loans for their full term (usually 10 years). We discounted the interest rate to account for market-expected annual inflation over the next 10 years, about 2.6% as of July 2025.

For gross returns, we included these items:

• The difference between post-MBA and pre-MBA salaries for the 10 years after graduation. We assumed that post- and pre-MBA salaries would grow at the 10-year average of the Atlanta Fed’s wage-growth tracker for high-skilled and mid-skilled workers (4.2% and 4.1% as of July 2025, respectively), with both figures discounted by that expected inflation figure.
• The value of any signing bonus after being invested for 10 years at an assumed return rate of 5.5%, also discounted for inflation.

To help users answer six of the tool’s 10 questions, it displays medians based on Bloomberg Businessweek’s Best B-Schools surveys of thousands of people who attended 68 different MBA programs in the US. Responses included in those medians came from students who graduated from 2016 to this year. The surveys were conducted from 2023 to 2025, some for alumni and some for students nearing graduation. (The 2024 version of the tool included data from about 73 schools; respondents from 66 schools provided enough valid data to appear in both the 2024 and the 2025 versions.)

For users who don’t want to base calculations on a specific business school, we show medians for pre- and post-MBA annual salaries and signing bonuses. We also provide the median program’s median cost (tuition, room, board and other living expenses) and median student loan amount, as well as its typical length (in months), all based on the surveys. Cost figures differ from the tuition-plus-fees figures displayed in our Best B-Schools Rankings, which are the schools’ latest advertised prices, while the tool’s medians also include living expenses and are based on responses covering multiple school years.

Once a user selects one of the 68 schools, these six figures (pre-MBA pay, MBA expenses, loans, post-MBA pay, signing bonus and program length) reflect survey-based medians for the chosen program.

To ensure that all the above medians weren’t skewed, we excluded some survey responses from our calculations. We did not include responses from incomplete surveys or those that reported earning nothing (zero) before or after graduating. We also excluded answers that resulted in any one of these figures being more than two standard deviations away from the respondent’s school average: total expenses; 10-year differences between post- and pre-MBA pay; and annualized ROI percentages. Finally, we started with the well-documented assumption that MBAs increase earning potential, so we left out responses that reported earning less after graduating than before.

After those exclusions, the number of valid responses per school for the six key figures averages 84, the median is 58, and all of the figures are based on 16 or more responses. The surveys didn’t ask the exact same questions each year, so medians for signing bonuses and student loans relied on three student surveys, while medians for expenses and pre- and post-MBA pay relied on three alumni surveys and one student survey.

Some responses are in currencies other than US dollars, so they are converted using average or spot exchange rates — the months in school for expenses, the two years before starting school for pre-MBA pay (or through July 2025 if fewer than 24 months elapsed), the date of the survey for post-MBA pay and the end of the graduation month for signing bonuses.

The surveys reflected respondents’ information as of as long ago as 2014, so all figures are adjusted for US inflation such that dollar sums reflect July 2025 values. Many respondents provided current compensation figures one or more years after graduating, so we backed out estimated raises (using the same high-skilled annual bump of 4.2%, adjusted for inflation) to estimate how much they made immediately after securing their MBA before calculating raises 10 years out.

Medians for debt amounts are calculated using only figures from respondents who reported taking student loans.

When no questions are answered (whether or not a school is selected), interest-payment calculations use a weighted average rate of 5.9% (again, discounted for inflation) over 10 years, the typical term for a student loan. The weighted average is based on the Department of Education’s unsubsidized graduate student rates from 2013 to 2024 and how many respondents borrowed in those years, also discounted for inflation. It’s used so schools’ median-based ROIs aren’t skewed by how many students attended in higher- or lower-rate years.

Once any question is answered, interest calculations are based on the DOE’s rate for 2025-26, 7.94%, unless the user changes it. For users who secure loans with interest rates below the expected rate of inflation (again, about 2.6%), the tool calculates the benefit to the borrower of such a low rate, resulting in negative interest costs that increase the calculated ROI.

Starting with the 2025-26 calculator, each school’s ROI figures and numbers used to calculate them (especially forgone income and time periods for making inflation and salary adjustments) are based on the number of months respondents reported being away from full-time work, including before and after school, so long as that figure is within six months of the length of the program they attended. Previously, we used the program length. Our methodology was changed to take advantage of a question added to our survey in recent years; for older survey responses and for responses not within six months of the program length, we revert to using that length.

That change also allows us to calculate how long each school’s typical student spends getting their MBA. We divide the median forgone income of each school’s attendees by their median monthly pre-MBA salary, producing a figure akin to the average time each program’s students spend away from full-time work. For comparisons with 2025, 2024 results are recalculated with this new methodology.