The compound annual growth rate for anything - your salary, an investment, a company’s revenue. See the real, inflation-adjusted growth, not just the number that sounds impressive on its own.
CAGR answers: "what single, steady annual growth rate would take the start value to the end value?" It's CAGR = (End ÷ Start)1/years − 1 - a compounding formula, not a simple average. Going from 100 to 200 over 10 years is not 10%/year (that's the simple-average trap) - it's 7.18%/year compounded, because each year's growth builds on the year before. The gap between those two numbers grows with both the size of the change and the number of years.
A salary that grew from $65,000 to $82,000 over 5 years grew at 4.72% a year - sounds solid, until you check it against inflation. If prices rose 3.5% a year over the same stretch, the real growth - what that raises actually bought - was only about 1.18% a year. This tool shows both, using the same real-return method (nominal minus inflation, compounded correctly) verified elsewhere on this site's retirement calculator. If the real figure comes out negative, the honest read is that pay technically rose while purchasing power quietly fell. Most CAGR calculators stop at the nominal number and leave that check to you - this one runs it automatically, every time.
Salary: compare a raise (or a job change) to inflation over the same window - the question above. Investment: a stock, fund, or property's CAGR is the standard way returns are quoted, and directly comparable to a savings account's stated rate once both are annualized the same way. Business metric: revenue, user count, or any other number a company reports - CAGR is how "grew 3x in 4 years" becomes a comparable annual rate against a competitor's "grew 40% a year." Related: the NPV & IRR calculator handles the case where money moves in and out at several different points in time, not just a single start and end value.