Retirement Calculator

Retirement Calculator projects a pension pot from where you are now: what you have saved, what you add each month, how long until you stop, and what you assume the money earns. It then turns the pot into a monthly income over the number of years you want it to last, which is the figure that actually tells you whether the plan works.

Two numbers do most of the work, and they pull in opposite directions. Time is the one that makes the projection look remarkable: thirty years of modest monthly saving at a reasonable return produces a pot several times larger than the sum of the contributions, because the growth compounds on growth. Inflation is the one that takes it back. Both are shown, and the today's-money figure is the one to plan with.

The income figure assumes the pot is drawn down over a fixed period at a lower return, which is how most retirement income actually works now. It is deliberately not a guaranteed annuity rate: those depend on life expectancy and market rates on the day you buy. Treat the income as an order of magnitude and the pot as the thing you can influence.

This is arithmetic, not financial advice. It tells you what the numbers do; it cannot tell you whether a decision is right for your circumstances. Fees, taxes and local rules vary, so check anything that matters against the actual offer and speak to someone qualified before committing.

Everything is worked out inside your browser. Nothing you enter is uploaded, logged or stored, which matters for the financial calculators in particular: the figures you put into them are nobody else's business.

• Shows pot at retirement, in today's money, you will pay in, growth adds and monthly income it supports together, so you are not running it twice
• Full year by year you can open and check
• Updates as you type, with no button to press and no page reload
• Copy the result in one click
• Free, no sign-up, and it runs entirely in your browser

The retirement calculator is used by writers, developers, students, marketers and anyone else who needs the job done once without installing software. Common cases include:

• Seeing whether your current contribution is anywhere near enough
• Working out what retiring five years earlier costs
• Comparing a projection in nominal and real terms
• Checking a pension statement projection against the arithmetic