Yield Function Excel

What this does

PRICE returns what a bond is worth per 100 of face value given a required yield; YIELD inverts the question, returning the yield implied by a market price; ACCRINT computes interest accrued between coupon dates. Two things trip people consistently. Settlement must fall before maturity or every one of them returns #NUM!. And redemption is expressed per 100 of face value, not as the total — passing the full principal produces a price out by orders of magnitude. The optional basis argument selects the day-count convention, which matters materially for accrued interest. The same idea underpins a lot of everyday Excel work, so the few minutes spent getting it right here pay back across every sheet you build afterwards. Treat it as a pattern, not a one-off, and it stops being something you look up and starts being something you reach for. The difference between a quick fix and a sheet you can trust is the extra minute you spend validating “yield function excel”. Start on a copy or a tiny sample, keep the affected formula visible, and compare the result with the tool above before you touch the real workbook. When a formula is involved, keep the inputs labelled beside it, reference cells instead of typing values, and apply number formatting only after the result checks out. The point is a calculation you can defend to a CFO or an auditor, but the practical win is that someone else can open the file and understand what happened without asking you.

A worked example

A bond settling 1 Feb 2026, maturing 1 Feb 2031, 5 % coupon paid semi-annually, market yield 4.5 %: =PRICE("2026-02-01", "2031-02-01", 5%, 4.5%, 100, 2) returns about 102.2 — a premium, because the coupon beats the required yield. Going the other way from a quoted price of 98.5: =YIELD(same dates, 5%, 98.5, 100, 2). These three are the standard bond-maths set, and the per-100 redemption convention is the detail that makes a first attempt wrong. A practical tip before you scale it up: build it once on a small block of test data, confirm the number against the tool on this page, and only then point it at your real sheet. That one habit catches almost every mistake while it is still cheap to fix, long before a wrong figure reaches a report or a colleague.

In Google Sheets

Google Sheets handles this almost identically to Excel. The formula syntax above is the same, and the menu lives under a slightly different label rather than a ribbon tab. Use the platform toggle at the top of the page to switch every keyboard shortcut between Windows and Mac, and expect at most cosmetic differences in naming. Nothing on this page is behind a login: the tool runs entirely in your browser, the formula is shown in full with one-click copy, and the steps work the same on Windows and Mac. That is the whole promise here — the exact answer, a way to prove it on your own numbers, and just enough context to make it stick. If you take one thing from this page on “yield function excel”, make it the habit rather than the keystrokes: set the problem up with labelled inputs, reference those cells, and let Excel do the recomputing. Bookmark the page for the syntax, but do the example once in a blank sheet and check it against the tool above — five minutes of hands-on practice fixes the method in memory far better than re-reading, and it surfaces the small snags while they are still harmless. After that the technique is genuinely yours: faster than searching for it again, and reliable enough to drop into work that other people depend on.

Common mistakes

• Passing the full principal as redemption instead of 100, which throws the price out by orders of magnitude.
• A settlement date on or after maturity, which returns #NUM!.
• Ignoring the basis argument on accrued-interest work, where the day-count convention changes the answer materially.

Frequently asked questions