Enter the yearly income you want in today's dollars. The ladder below prices it rung by rung with real coupon math, per-year overrides for uneven spending, and clear handling of the 2037-2039 gap years. Free, no login, formulas explained at the bottom.
| Maturity | Income target | Coupons from later rungs |
Principal to buy (par, today's $) |
Real yield |
Est. cost |
|---|
Reading this table: each row is one rung. In its maturity year a rung pays back its inflation-adjusted principal, and every rung you still hold pays its coupons; the calculator sizes each rung so principal plus coupons hits your income target, which is why later rungs are slightly larger than a naive division. All figures are in today's dollars; actual future payments will be larger in nominal terms by however much CPI inflation occurs.
A TIPS pays its real yield no matter what inflation does. A regular Treasury pays a fixed nominal yield, so its real return depends on the inflation that follows. The table below runs both at each inflation outcome. The crossover row is the breakeven: above it TIPS win, below it the regular bond wins. The market's own forecast is the breakeven itself, about 2.3% as of late July 2026.
| Inflation runs at | TIPS real return | Regular bond real return |
TIPS: ending value (today's $) |
Regular: ending value (today's $) |
Winner |
|---|
The math: a regular bond's real return at inflation i is (1 + nominal) / (1 + i) - 1, compounded over the horizon. The TIPS row never moves because its principal adjusts with CPI; that is the product. The highlighted row is the exact breakeven, (1 + nominal) / (1 + real) - 1: at that inflation rate both bonds buy the same goods at maturity. Ending values are in today's purchasing power. Held to maturity; ignores taxes (see the tax question below; the two are taxed differently in taxable accounts) and reinvestment of coupons.
The Treasury never issued TIPS maturing in 2037, 2038, or 2039, a hangover from the years when 20-year TIPS were discontinued and 10-year issuance had not yet reached them. Rows for those years are highlighted above. You have three workarounds:
1. Fill them as they become available. The 10-year TIPS auctioned in 2027, 2028, and 2029 will mature in 2037, 2038, and 2039. If your ladder start is still a few years away, plan the purchase and buy at those auctions.
2. Double up the shoulder years. Buy extra 2036 and 2040 principal and spread the proceeds across the gap. Simple, but the gap-year money sits uninvested (or in nominal Treasuries) for a year or three, which costs you some inflation protection exactly where you wanted it.
3. Buy longer and plan to sell. Hold 2040+ maturities against the gap years and sell rungs early as needed. Works, but an early sale re-exposes you to interest-rate risk, the one thing a hold-to-maturity ladder was supposed to remove.
This calculator prices gap-year rungs at interpolated yields as if bonds existed. Treat those rows as planning placeholders for workaround one, not as something you can buy today.
A fund never matures. In 2022, holders of broad TIPS funds lost roughly 12 to 18% in real terms as real yields rose, even though every individual bond inside the fund kept its inflation guarantee. A fund constantly rolls its holdings, so there is no date on which you are made whole. A ladder of individual TIPS held to maturity has no such risk: each rung pays its inflation-adjusted principal on schedule regardless of what rates did in between. Funds are fine for accumulation; ladders are for locking in specific spending years.
They do. The annual inflation adjustment to your principal is taxable federal income in the year it accrues, even though you don't receive it in cash until maturity (it arrives on Form 1099-OID). A $10,000 TIPS in a 3% inflation year generates about $300 of taxable income you never saw. That is why the standard advice is to hold TIPS ladders inside an IRA or 401(k) where the phantom income doesn't matter. TIPS interest is exempt from state and local tax either way.
Almost certainly not. Principal adjustments follow non-seasonally-adjusted CPI with a three-month lag, and NSA-CPI routinely prints small negative months in the second half of the year. Deflationary accrual months are normal and temporary. At maturity, the Treasury pays the greater of adjusted or original principal, so a bond bought at issue can never mature below par.
Auctions (via any major brokerage, or TreasuryDirect) are the simplest: no bid-ask spread and clean pricing. New 5-year TIPS are auctioned in April and October, 10-year in January and July, 30-year in February, with reopenings in between. The secondary market is how you buy specific maturity years right now to fill a ladder. Watch one brokerage quirk: auto-roll settings can reinvest a maturing rung into a new bond you did not want. At one major brokerage, turning auto-roll off requires a phone call.
This is a planning approximation: each rung is assumed purchased at par with a coupon equal to its assumed real yield (approximately what happens when you buy at auction). The calculator then works backward from your last year: each year's income target is met by that rung's principal plus coupon, less the coupon income thrown off by all later-maturing rungs you still hold. Real purchases involve specific CUSIPs at market prices with accrued inflation adjustments, so treat this as a planning estimate that is typically within a few percent, not a trade ticket.
This calculator sizes the ladder. The primer explains everything around it: funds vs. individual bonds after the 2022 lesson, the tax mechanics with worked examples, auction-by-auction buying walkthroughs for the major brokerages, the deflation floor's edge cases, what the SECURE Act does to inherited ladders, and a formulas-visible companion spreadsheet you can audit. The TIPS Primer (2026 edition) is in production.
One email when the primer launches, plus early-bird pricing. Nothing else, no list-selling.