Retirement Calculator

The most common rule of thumb is the 4% rule: take your desired annual retirement income, multiply by 25, and that's your target nest egg. $60,000/year means $1.5 million; $100,000/year means $2.5 million. Adjust upward (28–33× expenses) if you're retiring before 60 or expect a 40-year horizon, and downward if Social Security and a pension will cover a large share of your spending.

It's a withdrawal strategy: in year one of retirement, withdraw 4% of your portfolio, then increase that dollar amount by inflation each year. The rule was proposed by William Bengen in a 1994 Journal of Financial Planning article and later corroborated by the Trinity Study (Cooley, Hubbard, Walz 1998). Both showed that a 4% inflation-adjusted withdrawal from a 50/50 to 75/25 stock/bond portfolio survived almost every rolling 30-year window in U.S. market history. It is a planning anchor, not a guarantee.

Yes — for most workers, Social Security replaces around 40% of pre-retirement earnings, more for lower earners and less for high earners. The practical approach is to estimate your benefit using the Social Security Administration's online tools, subtract it from your desired annual income, and apply the 4% rule only to the remainder. If you expect $24,000/year from Social Security and need $60,000 total, the savings goal is 25 × $36,000 = $900,000, not $1.5 million.

Sequence-of-returns risk is the danger of getting poor investment returns in the first few years of retirement, when your portfolio is largest and you're starting withdrawals. The same average return delivered in a different order can produce dramatically different outcomes: a bad first decade forces you to sell more shares while prices are depressed, locking in losses. Two retirees with identical average returns can end up bankrupt or wealthy depending on the sequence. Mitigations include holding 2–3 years of expenses in cash/bonds, reducing withdrawals in down years, and avoiding overly aggressive allocations near retirement.

Early retirement means a shorter accumulation window and a longer drawdown — sometimes 40 to 50 years. Two adjustments are common: (1) save much more aggressively, often 30–50% of income; (2) use a lower safe withdrawal rate, around 3 to 3.5%, which raises the target multiplier from 25× expenses to 28–33×. You'll also need a bridge strategy for the years before age 59½ when penalty-free retirement account withdrawals begin — typically a taxable brokerage account, Roth contributions (which can be withdrawn anytime), or a Rule 72(t) substantially equal periodic payment plan.

Inflation erodes future purchasing power. At a historical average of about 3% per year, prices roughly double every 24 years — so $60,000 of spending today costs about $146,000 in 30 years. This calculator shows an inflation-adjusted goal that scales your target forward. A simpler workaround is to subtract your inflation assumption from your expected return (use 4% instead of 7%) so your projected balance comes out in today's dollars.

Healthcare is one of the largest retirement expenses and is not covered by the projected balance unless you've explicitly budgeted for it. Medicare starts at 65 and has premiums, deductibles, and coverage gaps; Part B and a Medigap or Advantage plan typically run $2,500 to $4,000 per year per person. Fidelity's annual estimate is that a 65-year-old couple retiring today will need about $315,000 (after-tax) for medical expenses, not including long-term care. Many planners build a separate HSA earmark or simply target 10–20% above the 4% rule baseline.

You're not stuck. The main alternatives are a traditional or Roth IRA (up to $7,500 in 2026, or $8,600 if you're 50+), a SEP-IRA or Solo 401(k) if you're self-employed (limits much higher), an HSA if you have a high-deductible health plan ($4,400 individual, $8,750 family in 2026), and a regular taxable brokerage for anything beyond those caps. The math in this calculator works the same regardless of which account holds the money — what matters is the total monthly contribution and the expected return.

The 401(k) calculator models a single tax-advantaged account with employer matching, IRS contribution caps, and pre-tax savings, year by year. This retirement calculator is broader: it aggregates everything you save for retirement across all accounts, applies a single expected return, and frames the result against the 4% rule and inflation-adjusted goals. Use the 401(k) calculator to optimize the workplace plan; use this one to see whether the total plan — 401(k) plus IRA plus brokerage plus expected Social Security — gets you to the finish line.

Compound growth is exponential, so the return assumption has outsized influence on long-horizon results. Over 35 years, raising the expected return from 6% to 8% roughly doubles the projected balance. That sensitivity is why conservative planning typically uses 5%–7% and why running the same inputs at multiple return assumptions is a smart sanity check before committing to a savings rate.

Not directly. The projected balance is gross of taxes. Withdrawals from a traditional 401(k) or IRA are taxed as ordinary income; Roth withdrawals are tax-free; taxable brokerage withdrawals are mostly capital gains. A common workaround is to bump up your desired annual income by 15–25% to account for federal and state income tax in retirement, then apply the 4% rule to that gross figure.

Always capture the full employer 401(k) match first — that's an instant 50–100% return that no debt costs you. Above the match, compare your debt's interest rate to your expected investment return. Generally, pay off debt above roughly 7% before adding more to retirement; below that, splitting between debt paydown and additional savings usually wins long-term. High-interest credit card debt at 20%+ is always the first priority.