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Retirement Calculator
Find out if you are on track to retire. Enter your age, savings and monthly contributions, set the income you want, and press Calculate to project your nest egg and the income it can support.
Written by TopicDrill Editorial Team·Updated June 2026
Savings growth to retirement
Balance Paid in
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How the retirement calculator works
Retirement planning has two halves. First, how big will your savings grow by the day you stop working? Second, will that pile actually cover the lifestyle you want once the paychecks stop? This tool answers both. It grows your current savings and monthly contributions year by year, then converts the projected nest egg into a yearly income using the withdrawal rate you choose.
The chart traces your balance climbing from today to retirement. The dashed line is the money you actually pay in, and the shaded area above it is investment growth. Early on they hug each other, but the gap stretches wider every year as compounding takes over, which is the whole reason saving sooner beats saving more later.
A quick example
A 30 year old with $25,000 saved who adds $600 a month and earns 7 percent a year is projected to reach roughly $1.4 million by age 65. At a 4 percent withdrawal rate that supports about $56,000 of yearly income. If the goal is $60,000 a year, the tool flags a small shortfall, and bumping the monthly contribution up by a hundred dollars or so closes the gap.
Things to keep in mind
Markets do not deliver a smooth 7 percent every year, so treat the nest egg as a midpoint, not a promise, and revisit your plan regularly. Real plans also juggle Social Security, pensions, taxes and healthcare, none of which are modeled here. For unbiased basics on saving for retirement, see Investor.gov's retirement toolkit. To pin down a smaller milestone first, our emergency fund calculator is a good companion.
Frequently asked questions
How much do I need to retire?
A common rule of thumb is to multiply the annual income you want in retirement by 25, which matches a 4 percent withdrawal rate. If you want 60,000 dollars a year, that points to a nest egg near 1.5 million dollars. This calculator does that math for you and compares it against what your current savings plan is projected to reach.
What is a safe withdrawal rate?
A safe withdrawal rate is the percentage of your nest egg you can take out in the first year of retirement, then adjust for inflation each year, with a strong chance of not running out of money. The well known starting point is 4 percent, based on historical market returns over 30 year retirements. A lower rate is more cautious; a higher rate is riskier.
Why does starting early matter so much?
Because of compounding. Money invested in your twenties has decades to grow, so each early dollar can become many dollars by retirement, while a dollar saved a few years before retirement barely has time to grow. On the chart you will see the gap between what you paid in and your balance widen dramatically over time, and most of that gap is growth on early contributions.
Does this calculator account for inflation?
It keeps the comparison in today's dollars by treating your desired income and the return as real, before-inflation style figures, which keeps the result easy to read. For a more precise plan, lower the return you enter by your expected inflation rate to get a rough inflation-adjusted projection, and revisit the numbers every few years.
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