Retirement Calculator
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Project the corpus you'll have at retirement based on your current age, savings, monthly contribution, and expected return.
Projected Corpus
$1,465,039.79
At age 60
You'll Contribute
$318,800.00
28 years
Investment Growth
$1,146,239.79
Your retirement timeline
Stacked: your contributions vs. compound growth from year 32 to 60.
What this calculator projects
This is a retirement-corpus projection. You enter your current age, the age you want to retire at, what you've already saved, what you can contribute each month, and the rate of return you expect. It compounds those inputs forward to the target age and shows the corpus you'll have. It also shows the gap between what you're on track for and a rule-of-thumb target.
The most-cited target is the 25× rule. Whatever you spend in a year, multiply by 25. That's roughly the corpus you need to live off a 4% safe withdrawal rate. Spend $40,000 a year? Aim for $1 million. The 4% rule has limits in long retirements and falling-market scenarios, but it's a useful first-pass target.
How retirement projections work
The math combines two things. Your existing savings compound at the expected rate. Your monthly contributions compound as a recurring annuity. The final corpus is the sum of both:
Where S is current savings, P is monthly contribution, r is the monthly rate, and n is the number of months between now and retirement.
Worked example: 32 years old, retiring at 60, $50,000 saved, $800/month contributions, 8% annual return. n = 336 months, r = 0.08/12 ≈ 0.00667. Existing savings compound to roughly $463,000. Monthly contributions compound to roughly $1.17 million. Total corpus ≈ $1.63 million. The corpus would let you spend about $65,000/year under the 4% rule.
Common mistakes when planning for retirement
- Over-estimating returns. People often plug in 12% per year because that's what equities "return." The realistic post-fee, post-tax, inflation-adjusted return on a 60/40 portfolio is closer to 5–6%. Use a humble number. It's better to over-save than to discover at 65 that you're short.
- Ignoring inflation. A $1 million corpus in 2056 dollars is worth a fraction of $1 million today. Either project in real (inflation-adjusted) returns, or scale your target upward by expected inflation over the period.
- Counting Social Security as primary income. Treat any state pension, 401(k) match, or Social Security as a bonus on top of what this calculator projects. Don't plan your retirement around politics-dependent income.
- Skipping the early years. A dollar invested at 25 grows to about 21x by 65 at 8%. The same dollar invested at 45 grows to about 4.7x. The first decade of contributions does the heaviest lifting because it gets the most time to compound.
- Forgetting healthcare. Retiree healthcare can run $300,000–$500,000 over 25 years in the US alone. The 25× rule assumes constant spending, which understates the cost of healthcare and long-term care.
Frequently asked questions
- A common rule of thumb is 25× your annual expenses (the 4% safe-withdrawal rule). If you spend $40,000 a year, aim for a $1M corpus. Use the result here to compare your projection against that target.
- This calculator covers your private corpus only — it doesn't model government benefits. Treat any state pension or Social Security as a bonus on top of what's shown.
- Long-term US stock-market returns have averaged ~10% nominal (7% real). A balanced portfolio (60/40 stocks/bonds) historically returns 7–8% nominal. Pick a humble number — better to over-save than under-save.
- Not directly. The result is in today's nominal dollars. To see results in today's purchasing power, subtract your expected inflation rate (3% is a common assumption) from your return rate before entering it.
- Drop the retirement age. The chart will compress. Be aware that early retirement also extends your withdrawal phase — a 35-year retirement needs a fatter cushion than a 20-year one.
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