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Adding your SGPAs and dividing by six is the wrong answer
It is the most common way students work out their CGPA and it is wrong whenever the semesters differ in size, which is almost always. A cumulative grade point average is weighted by credits. A semester carrying twenty-six credits counts for more of your degree than one carrying eighteen, because you did more work in it, and a plain average quietly pretends the two were equal.
The correct method multiplies each semester's SGPA by the credits that semester carried, adds all of those products together, and divides by the total credits across every semester. Three semesters at 8.1, 8.6 and 7.9, carrying 24, 24 and 22 credits, give 194.4 plus 206.4 plus 173.8, which is 574.6 quality points over 70 credits, so the CGPA is 8.21. The plain average of those same three figures is 8.20. Close, in that case — but change one semester to twelve credits and the two answers separate immediately.
This calculator shows you both. Whenever the credit-weighted answer differs from the plain average it says so, along with the size of the gap, so you can see exactly what the shortcut would have cost you. If you would rather work from individual subjects than from whole semesters, the CGPA calculator takes subject credits and grades directly.
There is no single CGPA to percentage formula
This is the part that causes the most trouble on application forms, and it is worth being blunt about: the formula depends entirely on who issued your transcript. The famous multiply-by-9.5 rule belongs to CBSE and was set for class ten and class twelve board results. It was derived from the mark ranges behind each board grade, and it was never intended for a university CGPA.
Universities publish their own. Some multiply by ten and stop there. Anna University and several others subtract three quarters of a point first. A number of institutions subtract half a point instead. On a CGPA of 8.2 those four rules give 77.9, 82.0, 74.5 and 77.0 percent respectively — a spread of seven and a half points, which is easily the difference between clearing an employer's cut-off and not.
The dropdown on this page carries all four so you can see the spread for yourself, but seeing it is not the same as choosing. Find what your own university publishes, in the academic regulations or on the reverse of the grade sheet, and use that one. If your institution provides a conversion certificate, that document is what an employer or a foreign university will actually accept.
What SGPA and CGPA actually measure
An SGPA is one semester's credit-weighted average of grade points. A CGPA is the same arithmetic run across every semester you have completed. The relationship between them is worth internalising, because it explains why a great semester late in a degree moves the overall figure so little.
In your first semester the SGPA and the CGPA are the same number, because there is nothing else in the pool. By the sixth semester you are carrying roughly a hundred and forty credits of history, and a fresh twenty-four credit semester is about a sixth of the total. A perfect ten in that semester lifts a 7.5 CGPA to around 7.9, not to a nine. This is arithmetic rather than unfairness, but students discover it late and it is worth knowing early enough to act on.
If you want to work out what a coming semester has to hold to reach a particular overall figure, the target GPA calculator does that on the four point scale, and the same logic applies unchanged on a ten point one.
Credits, and where students get them wrong
Use the credits your grade sheet prints for the semester, not the number of subjects and not the contact hours. A four credit theory paper and a one credit laboratory are both subjects, and treating them as equal is the same mistake as averaging the semesters. Most Indian and Pakistani programmes run between twenty and twenty-six credits a semester, so a figure far outside that range usually means the wrong column was copied.
Backlogs and repeated papers are handled differently between universities, and no calculator can guess which rule applies to you. Some institutions count only the final attempt, others carry both into the pool. If you have a repeated paper, check the regulation before you trust any overall figure, including this one.