Retirement Calculator — Plan Your Retirement Online
Compare multiple retirement scenarios, estimate Social Security benefits, and see how your savings grow over time. All calculations happen locally — nothing leaves your browser.
How much do you need to retire? Enough that your savings plus any state or Social Security benefit cover your spending for as long as you live. This calculator answers it from the other direction: it projects what your current balance and monthly contributions will be worth at your chosen retirement age, expressed in today's purchasing power, then divides that pot across the years between retirement and your life expectancy to give a monthly income figure.
How to Use the Retirement Calculator
- Enter your ages and current balance — Current age, target retirement age and everything you already hold in retirement accounts. The gap between the two ages sets how many months of compounding the projection has to work with.
- Add your monthly contribution — Enter your own contribution only — the employer match has its own field below. Include what goes into a 401(k), IRA, workplace pension or ISA, since the model treats them as one pot.
- Set the return, inflation and salary growth rates — Return and inflation are combined into a real rate, so the headline figure is already in today's money. Salary growth increases your contribution each year rather than your balance.
- Set a life expectancy — This is the only thing determining how many years the pot has to stretch across, so it drives the monthly income figure directly. Living past an average is a normal outcome, so err long rather than short.
- Add Social Security if it applies — Enter your estimated monthly benefit at 67 and the age you plan to claim. The tool scales the amount up for claiming late and down for claiming early, and ignores it entirely if you retire before your chosen claiming age.
- Compare the three retirement ages — The cards at the bottom re-run the whole projection at 60, 65 and 70. Read all three — the badge marks the biggest balance, which is always the latest age, not necessarily the best decision.
How the Projection Works
The balance is stepped forward one month at a time rather than through a single closed-form formula, because your contribution changes each year. Every month, the existing balance grows and the new contribution is added. The growth rate is not the return you typed in — it is the return net of inflation, computed monthly:
real monthly rate = (1 + annual return / 12) / (1 + inflation / 12) − 1That single choice is what makes the output readable. At the defaults of 7% return and 3% inflation, the balance compounds at roughly 0.33% a month rather than 0.58%, and the projected figure means what it says: a pot that buys today what that number buys today. You do not need to mentally deflate it, and you should not add an inflation adjustment on top.
Salary growth works on the contribution, not the balance. Each year, the monthly amount is multiplied by (1 + salary growth), so a $500 contribution rising 3% a year becomes about $672 after ten years and $903 after twenty. This is the single most optimistic assumption in the model, because it quietly requires you to raise your saving every year in line with your pay rather than absorbing raises into spending.
How retirement income is worked out
The monthly income figure is deliberately simple, and it is not the 4% rule:
monthly income = projected savings / (months between retirement and life expectancy)The pot is divided evenly across your remaining years and assumed to earn nothing once you stop working, then any Social Security benefit is added on top. That yields a higher monthly figure than the 4% rule but empties the account exactly at your life expectancy: $1,000,000 over a 20-year retirement gives about $4,167 a month here, against $3,333 under a 4% withdrawal that in principle never runs out. Read it as a straight-line budget, not a sustainable withdrawal rate, and cross-check it with the Withdrawal Rate Calculator if longevity is your main worry.
How the employer match is estimated
The match fields need a salary to work against, and the tool does not ask for one. It infers it by assuming your contribution is 15% of pay, so a $500 monthly contribution implies a salary of about $40,000, and the match cap is applied against that estimate. If you save a very different share of your income, the match figure will be off — and the fix is straightforward: work out your employer's annual match yourself, divide by twelve, add it to your own monthly contribution, and leave the match percentage at zero.
Social Security Claiming Age
For anyone born in 1960 or later, full retirement age in the United States is 67. Claiming earlier permanently reduces the monthly benefit; claiming later permanently increases it. The reduction is not linear: the Social Security Administration cuts 5/9 of 1% a month for the first 36 months early and 5/12 of 1% a month beyond that, while delayed retirement credits add 8% for each year past full retirement age up to 70. This calculator uses a flat 6.67% per year for early claiming, which is a close approximation for one or two years early and increasingly generous below 65.
| Claiming age | Actual SSA benefit (FRA 67) | This tool's approximation |
|---|---|---|
| 62 | 70.0% | 66.7% |
| 63 | 75.0% | 73.3% |
| 64 | 80.0% | 80.0% |
| 65 | 86.7% | 86.7% |
| 66 | 93.3% | 93.3% |
| 67 | 100.0% | 100.0% |
| 68 | 108.0% | 108.0% |
| 69 | 116.0% | 116.0% |
| 70 | 124.0% | 124.0% |
Percentages are of your primary insurance amount. Full retirement age is lower than 67 for people born before 1960, which shifts the whole table.
Waiting from 62 to 70 raises the monthly benefit by roughly 77% in real terms, but you forgo eight years of payments to get it. The crossover — the age at which the larger delayed cheque has repaid the payments you skipped — typically falls somewhere in the late seventies to early eighties, before accounting for investment returns on the early money. That makes it largely a longevity and liquidity question rather than a maths question, and it is worth getting personalised advice on if the benefit is a big share of your income. Get your own benefit estimate from your official statement rather than guessing at the field.
What the Model Does Not Include
Four omissions matter enough to name. Tax is absent entirely, so withdrawals from a traditional 401(k) or IRA will be worth less than the figure shown, while Roth withdrawals will be closer to it. Required minimum distributions and any contribution limits are not enforced, so the model will happily project a contribution the law would not allow. Healthcare is not separated out, even though it is the expense most likely to rise faster than general inflation in later life. And market volatility is missing: one constant real return each year cannot show what happens if a severe drop lands in the first years of retirement, which is when a portfolio is least able to recover.
The scenario cards deserve one caution of their own. The badge marks the highest projected balance, and with positive contributions that is always the latest retirement age, because more years means more compounding and more deposits. It is a description of the arithmetic, not a recommendation. Retiring at 70 with more money is not obviously better than retiring at 60 with less, and the calculator has no way to price the five extra years of free time.
These projections are informational estimates for planning, not financial, tax or investment advice, and no return you enter is a prediction. Talk to a licensed financial adviser about your own circumstances before making retirement decisions, particularly around claiming ages, account types and tax.
Frequently Asked Questions
Common guidance is 10–15% of gross income including any employer match, with a rough target of ten to twelve times your final salary by your late sixties. Those are starting points, not answers: what you actually need is driven by your spending, not your salary, and by how long the money has to last. Run this calculator with your real expense figure rather than a rule of thumb, and treat the multiple as a sanity check.
For a diversified portfolio held for decades, 6–7% is a common planning assumption; broad equity indices have averaged closer to 10% a year nominally over very long periods, with the gap being inflation. Use a lower figure as you approach retirement and your allocation shifts toward bonds. Whatever you choose is an average across good and bad decades, not a forecast for any single year.
Today's money. The calculator divides your return by inflation on a monthly basis rather than simply subtracting, so the balance compounds at a real rate and the result already reflects purchasing power. Do not apply your own inflation adjustment afterwards — that would double-count it and understate the answer.
You can claim from 62 or delay to 70. At a full retirement age of 67, claiming at 62 permanently cuts the benefit to 70% of your primary insurance amount, while waiting to 70 raises it to 124%. The break-even point — where the larger delayed payments have made up for the years you skipped — usually falls in the late seventies or early eighties. Delaying favours long lives and people who can afford to wait; claiming early favours immediate need or poor health.
No. It divides the whole pot evenly across the months between retirement and your life expectancy, assuming no further growth, then adds any Social Security. That produces a larger monthly figure than a 4% withdrawal but drains the balance to zero exactly at your life expectancy, with nothing left if you live longer. If you want a withdrawal that is designed to survive a long retirement, use the Withdrawal Rate Calculator instead.
Two likely reasons. The match only applies when both the match percentage and the cap are above zero, and the percentage field defaults to zero. Beyond that, the tool estimates your salary as your annual contribution divided by 0.15, so if you save much more or less than 15% of your pay the cap will bind at the wrong point. The reliable workaround is to calculate the annual match yourself, fold it into the monthly contribution field, and leave the match percentage at zero.
No. All calculations run in JavaScript in your browser and nothing is transmitted to a server. Your inputs are written into the page URL so a bookmark reopens the same scenario — which also means your ages, balance and salary assumptions are visible in that link, so be careful before sharing it.
No. The projection ignores tax completely. Money in a traditional 401(k) or IRA is taxed as income when withdrawn, so the real spending power of the projected pot is lower; money in a Roth account is generally not. A practical adjustment is to reduce the monthly income figure by your expected effective rate on the taxable portion, or to speak with a tax professional about your specific account mix.
Use Cases
Pricing Five Extra Years of Work
A 45-year-old reads the 60, 65 and 70 cards side by side to see exactly what each additional working decade adds to monthly income.
Testing a Contribution Increase
Raising the monthly figure from $500 to $750 after a promotion, to see how many years of the shortfall that single change closes.
Comparing Claiming Ages
Running the same plan with Social Security starting at 62, 67 and 70 to weigh a smaller cheque now against a 124% one later.
Stress-Testing a Longer Life
Changing life expectancy from 85 to 95 to see how far the monthly income falls when the same pot has to cover ten more years.
Checking a Late Start
A 50-year-old with $50,000 saved models what a catch-up contribution rate has to be to produce a workable income at 67.
Testing a Lower Return Assumption
Dropping the expected return from 7% to 5% to see how much of the projection depends on markets behaving as they have historically.