What Is a Payback Period? The payback period is the amount of time (usually measured in years) it takes to recover an initial investment outlay—as measured in after-tax cash flows. For example, if a ...

Julia Kagan is a financial/consumer journalist and former senior editor, personal finance, of Investopedia. David Kindness is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and an expert in the fields of ...

The payback period is how long it will take to recover money invested in a project, and the so-called straight-payback-period calculation is the simplest way of determining the project's investment ...