The invention is a method for compensating for coning in a strapdown inertial navigation system which utilizes groups of five successive incremental angles of rotation of a body-fixed coordinate system as measured by orthogonally-mounted gyros at regular measurement intervals, each group of five measurements being obtained during a group interval equal to five measurement intervals. The coning-compensated angular displacement of the body-fixed coordinate system about a fixed axis in space during a p'th group interval is obtained by summing the five measured incremental angles and a coning compensation term. The coning compensation term consists of the sum of: (1) one-half the cross-product of a first and a second vector sum, the second vector sum being the sum of the five incremental angles of rotation in a group and the first vector sum being the sum of the second vector sum over p groups; and (2) the weighted sum of three vector cross-products, the multiplier and the multiplicand of each vector cross-product being a weighted sum of five measured incremental angles. The coning-compensated angular displacement can be summed over p to obtain an accurate estimate of the vector angle of rotation over a plurality of group intervals.