Rhode Island 401(k) calculator

What the contribution limit covers

Your own money, and only your own money.

The elective deferral limit applies to what you put in. Your employer's match does not count against it. This is a common misunderstanding and an expensive one, because people stop contributing partway through the year believing the match has consumed their room. There is a separate, much higher combined limit that includes employer contributions, and very few people come near it.

For 2026 the IRS set the elective deferral limit at $24,500, with a $8,000 catch-up from age 50 and a larger $11,250 catch-up in the four-year window from 60 to 63 that replaces the age-50 amount rather than stacking with it. At 64 you go back to $8,000.

How much can I contribute this year?

Check the current figure rather than trusting any number written into a page, including this one.

Contribution limits are adjusted for inflation and change most years. A calculator that hardcodes last year's limit quietly understates what you can save, and an article that does the same is wrong from the January it stops being maintained. We keep the current figures in one place: our 401(k) contribution limits guide is updated when the IRS publishes, and the IRS newsroom announcement is linked in the sources below. The IRA limits guide covers the other account most people should be using alongside it.

The tool reads the limit from the same data set the articles cite, so the projection caps your contribution at the current figure automatically. If you enter a contribution rate that would exceed it, the tool says so and projects at the limit instead of pretending you could put in more.

A worked example at the default inputs

The calculator opens on a $25,000 balance, a $75,000 salary, a 6% contribution, an employer match of 50% on the first 6% of salary, age 35, a 25-year projection and a 6% assumed annual return.

Roughly 60% of that final balance is growth rather than money paid in, which is the whole argument for starting early. The match alone contributes $56,250 of the $168,750 put in, and the growth on that match is a further six figures by the end.

Change the contribution rate from 6% to 10% and the projection rises to about $658,300. Note what does not change: the employer match stays at $2,250, because the match formula stops at 6% of salary. Four extra points of your own salary bought roughly $170,000 of ending balance, and none of it came from your employer.

Change the assumed return instead and the spread is wider still. The same contributions at 5% rather than 6% land near $414,900; at 7% they land near $577,600. One percentage point of assumption, in either direction, is worth more than the entire employer match over this horizon, which is a useful warning about how much weight to put on any single projected number.

Why does the employer match matter so much?

Because it is an immediate return nothing else can beat.

A 50% match on the first 6% of salary is a 50% return on that money before it is invested in anything at all. No fund, no asset class and no market does that reliably in a year. Contributing less than the full match is leaving pay on the table, and it is the single most common avoidable error in workplace retirement saving.

Beyond the match, the 401(k) competes with an IRA, which usually offers far better fund choices and lower fees than a workplace plan. A common ordering, and a defensible one:

• Contribute to the match. Whatever percentage your plan matches to, contribute at least that.
• Clear high-interest debt. Nothing in a retirement account reliably returns what a credit card charges.
• Fill an IRA. Better funds, lower costs, and the limit is separate from the 401(k) limit.
• Return to the 401(k). Up to the elective deferral limit, and beyond that only if your plan offers after-tax contributions worth using.
• Then taxable investing. No limits, no lock-up, no tax deferral.

Our investing section works through where each of these fits.

Vesting, and the money that is not yours yet

Employer contributions frequently vest on a schedule, commonly over three to five years, either gradually or in a single cliff. Money that has not vested is not yours. Leaving before it does forfeits it, and it is worth knowing the schedule before you accept an offer elsewhere.

Your own contributions are always fully yours from the day they are made, as is the growth on them. This calculator does not model vesting at all: it treats every dollar of match as retained, which is optimistic if you change jobs during a cliff period.

The two common shapes are worth recognising. Cliff vesting gives you nothing until a set date and then everything at once, so leaving a month early forfeits the lot. Graded vesting hands over a fixed share each year, commonly twenty percent a year across five, so an early departure keeps a proportion. Both are legal and both are disclosed in the summary plan description, which is the document to read rather than the recruiter's summary.

At the default inputs the employer match is $2,250 a year. Three years of unvested match walking out of the door with you is $6,750 of contributions, and by the end of a twenty-five-year horizon the compounded value of that money is several times larger. It is not a reason to stay in a job you should leave. It is a number worth knowing before you negotiate a start date, because a few weeks of timing occasionally moves it.

The mistakes that cost the most

Contributing below the full match. Covered above, and worth repeating because it is the most expensive habit on this page.

Front-loading into the limit with a per-pay-period match. Many plans match each pay period rather than annually. Hitting the annual limit in September stops your contributions, and in a plan without a true-up provision it stops the match with them. Check whether your plan trues up before you accelerate.

Ignoring fees. A one percentage point difference in annual costs across 25 years is worth tens of thousands of dollars of the balance above. The projection here assumes zero fees, so read the fund expense ratios in your plan documents.

Treating the projected balance as real money. Nothing here is inflation adjusted. At 3% inflation, purchasing power roughly halves every 24 years, so the $488,700 above buys something closer to what $230,000 buys today.

Cashing out on a job change. A small balance moved to cash triggers income tax and, usually, a penalty, and removes the decades of compounding that made it worth having.

Assuming the tax treatment is settled. Traditional and Roth deferrals produce very different outcomes and this tool does not distinguish between them. The tax section covers the trade-off.

Before you set the deferral rate

• Find the exact match formula in the plan document, not the summary email
• Set your deferral to at least the percentage the match stops at
• Check whether the plan trues up a match missed by hitting the limit early
• Read the vesting schedule and note the dates
• Look up the expense ratios of the funds you are actually holding
• Check this year's contribution limit against the current IRS figure
• Turn on automatic annual escalation if the plan offers it

What this projection does not do

Its own caveats, and they matter more than the precision of the output:

• A projection is not a forecast. Returns vary year to year, and the sequence matters enormously. A long run of poor years early does far more damage than the same run late, even with an identical average.
• Figures are in future dollars. Inflation is not taken out. Nothing on the result screen is in today's purchasing power.
• The growth model is a convention. Contributions arrive through the year rather than in one lump, so each year's own contribution earns roughly half a year of growth in the model. Returns are applied as a constant annual rate, which no real market provides.
• Salary is held flat. No raises, no promotions, and therefore no growth in the contribution or the match.
• Fees, vesting, loans and hardship withdrawals are all ignored. Each of them reduces a real balance.
• The tax treatment is not modelled. Traditional contributions are taxed on the way out and Roth contributions are not, and the same nominal balance is worth materially different amounts under each.

If your contribution rate would exceed the current limit, the tool caps it and says so rather than projecting a balance you could not legally build. Full method on the methodology page; nothing here is investment advice, see the disclaimer.