Skip to content

Retirement Calculator

Project the balance a retirement pot could reach from current savings and monthly contributions.

Input Details

Your Results

What Retirement Calculator does

Retirement planning has an unusually long horizon, which makes compounding the dominant force: contributions made early have decades to grow, and contributions made late have very few years.

This projects a balance at your chosen retirement age from what you have now, what you add each month, and an assumed rate of return.

  • Current age and target retirement age
  • Current savings and monthly contribution
  • Assumed annual return, compounded monthly
  • Split between contributions and growth

How to use Retirement Calculator

  1. 1

    Enter your ages

    The gap between them is the growth period.

  2. 2

    Enter savings and contributions

    Include everything you save towards retirement each month.

  3. 3

    Choose a return assumption

    Test a pessimistic figure as well as an optimistic one. The spread between them tells you how much of your plan is assumption.

  4. 4

    See what the growth contributes

    Over long periods, growth typically exceeds total contributions, which is the argument for starting early.

Limits and known behaviour

  • Returns are assumed constant. Markets are not, and poor returns immediately before or after retirement affect the outcome far more than the same returns in the middle of the period.
  • Inflation is not applied, so the projected figure is in today's nominal dollars and will buy less than it appears to.
  • Tax treatment, employer contributions, contribution limits and state pensions are not modelled.
  • Fees are not deducted.
  • This projects accumulation only. It does not model drawdown, longevity or whether the balance will last.
  • Amounts are calculated and displayed in US dollars using US lending conventions. The arithmetic is currency-independent, so the results hold for another currency if you read the symbol as your own.
  • Figures are estimates for comparison and planning. They are not financial advice, not a quote, and not an offer of credit.

Privacy and data handling

Runs entirely in your browser

  • Every figure you enter stays in this page. What you type about your retirement savings is not transmitted, logged or stored anywhere.
  • There is no account, no saved history and no autosave: reloading the page clears the form.

Site-wide data handling, including analytics and advertising, is described in the privacy policy.

Frequently asked questions

How much do I need to retire?

That depends on your spending, other income and how long the money must last, none of which this calculator knows. A common rule of thumb is 25 times annual spending, which corresponds to a 4% withdrawal rate, but it is a starting point for a conversation with an adviser rather than an answer.

Why is my projection so sensitive to the return rate?

Because compounding is exponential over decades. A one-point difference in annual return compounds into a very large difference across thirty or forty years, which is why testing several assumptions matters more than perfecting one.