Sunday, November 3, 2013

Project IRR vs Equity IRR


The project IRR takes as its inflows the full amount(s) of money that are needed in the project. The outflows are the cash generated by the project. The IRR is the internal rate of return of these cash flows. The calculation assumes that no debt is used for the project.

Equity IRR assumes that you use debt for the project, so the inflows are the cash flows required minus any debt that was raised for the project. The outflows are cash flows from the project minus any interest and debt repayments. Hence, equity IRR is essentially the “leveraged” version of project IRR.

Generally Equity IRR is more than project IRR and the equity IRR will be lower than the project IRR whenever the cost of debt exceeds the project IRR. 

Project IRR and Equity IRR
Equity IRR and Project IRR