Projected balance
$1,381,802
Project the balance you would reach from what you hold now plus what you contribute each month, then see what monthly income that balance supports at three different withdrawal rates. The conversion from balance to income is the step most retirement calculators leave out, and it is the step where plans fail.
The withdrawal rate is a planning assumption, not a guarantee. Income shown is before tax and before any investment fees, and it makes no allowance for Social Security, a pension, an annuity or part-time earnings. Market losses during retirement are not modelled.
| Years from now | Projected balance | Monthly income at this rate |
|---|---|---|
| 10 | $238,951 | $796.50 |
| 20 | $618,678 | $2,062.26 |
| 30 | $1,381,802 | $4,606.01 |
| 40 | $2,915,421 | $9,718.07 |
Accumulating a balance is the easier half of retirement arithmetic, because the inputs are under your control. Converting that balance into an income you cannot outlive is the harder half, because the inputs are not. This calculator does the first part with the same monthly compounding used everywhere else on the site, and then does the second part with a single multiplication.
The simplicity of that second line is the thing to be suspicious of. Multiplying a balance by 4% assumes the balance keeps earning while you withdraw from it, that the withdrawals rise with inflation, and that the sequence of returns is kind. The rule is a useful planning heuristic with a specific origin in historical US market data, and its reputation is more solid than its guarantees.
On the default projection — $50,000 to start, $800 a month, 7% for 30 years — the balance reaches $1,381,802. The income that balance supports depends entirely on the rate you assume for drawing it down, and the range is wide.
| Withdrawal rate | Annual income | Monthly income | Implied planning horizon |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3.5% | $48,363 | $4,030.25 | Designed to survive a 30-year retirement with high confidence |
| 4.0% | $55,272 | $4,606.01 | The traditional figure, based on historical US data |
| 4.5% | $62,182 | $5,181.76 | Higher income, materially higher risk of depletion |
Moving from 3.5% to 4.5% raises the monthly income by $1,151.51, which is 28.6% more, on an unchanged balance. Nothing about the savings changed; only the assumption changed. That is why the withdrawal rate belongs on the front of a retirement plan rather than in a footnote, and why two people with identical balances can hold justified but very different expectations of what they can spend.
The 4% figure is conventionally traced to work on US historical returns in the 1990s, and its durability has been debated ever since. Two arguments push it downward: bond yields have been low relative to long-run history, and the sequence of returns during the early years of retirement matters more than the average over the whole period. A retiree who loses 25% in the first two years of drawing down a portfolio is in a worse position than one who loses the same 25% a decade later, even though the arithmetic average is identical. That asymmetry is not something this calculator can express, and it is the strongest argument for treating the output as an upper bound.
If the monthly contribution above feeds a tax-advantaged account, there is a legal maximum, and it is worth knowing where your plan sits relative to it. The 2026 limits were set by the IRS in Notice 2025-67 and apply from 1 January 2026.
| Limit | Annual | Monthly equivalent |
|---|---|---|
| 401(k), 403(b) and 457(b) elective deferral | $24,500 | $2,041.67 |
| Additional catch-up, age 50 and over | $8,000 | $666.67 |
| Total employee deferral at 50 and over | $32,500 | $2,708.33 |
| Enhanced catch-up, ages 60 to 63 | $11,250 | $937.50 |
| IRA contribution limit | $7,500 | $625.00 |
| Total contributions from all sources, one employer | $72,000 | $6,000.00 |
2026 limits per IRS Notice 2025-67. The elective deferral limit is shared across all 401(k) and 403(b) plans you participate in during the year.
The default $800 a month is $9,600 a year, which is 39.2% of the elective deferral limit. That leaves considerable room, and it also means the plan is not constrained by the rules — it is constrained by the contribution, which is a much more tractable problem.
Two details in the table are easy to miss. First, the elective deferral limit is personal and shared across employers' plans, while the $72,000 ceiling covers employee and employer money together; the two tests apply simultaneously and either can bind. Second, from 2026 the catch-up contribution must be made on a Roth basis if your prior-year wages from that employer exceeded $150,000, which changes the tax treatment of that slice of the contribution. Neither detail is modelled by this calculator, which is why the limits are printed as a table rather than fed into the arithmetic.
The projection curve is not a straight line, and the shape of it is the most useful thing on this page. Between year 20 and year 30 of the default plan, the balance rises from $618,678 to $1,381,802 — a gain of $763,124, which is more than the entire total of contributions across all thirty years.
Of the $1,381,802 final balance, $338,000 came from contributions and $1,043,802 came from returns. The returns account for 75.5% of the outcome. That ratio is the reason a plan reviewed at year five can look discouraging and a plan reviewed at year thirty looks implausible: the two reviews are describing different mechanisms, and the second one has barely started by year five.
The corollary is uncomfortable for anyone starting late. Because the late years are where the growth concentrates, a plan begun at 45 with a large contribution cannot simply replicate one begun at 25 with a small one. The early plan has more years in which growth compounds on growth, and no amount of extra money in the final decade reproduces that. It does not mean a late start is pointless — the difference between starting at 45 and not starting at all is enormous — but it does mean the honest comparison is between what you can do now and nothing, rather than between what you can do now and what you might have done then.
Working backwards, divide the annual income you want by your withdrawal rate. At a 4% rate, $60,000 a year requires $1,500,000 of savings; at 3.5% the same income requires about $1,714,000. That is the whole calculation, and it is worth doing before the forward projection, because it turns an abstract balance into a target. Enter the amount you would need as a lump sum, set the contribution to zero, and the tool will tell you what it projects to instead.
It is a planning heuristic rather than a rule, and this page presents it as such. Its critics point to lower bond yields than the historical record and to the outsized influence of the first few years of drawdown. Its defenders point out that most historical retirements ended with the portfolio larger than it began. The practical response is to stress-test: run the projection at 3.5% as well as 4%, and treat the difference between those two monthly incomes as the range of what you can responsibly plan around.
The usual ordering is to capture any employer match first, because it is an immediate return that no market can match, then fill the IRA or return to the 401(k) depending on the fees and fund options in each. The 2026 limits are $24,500 for elective deferrals and $7,500 for an IRA, and they are separate, so the two are not alternatives so much as a sequence. This calculator models neither the tax treatment nor any employer match; what it does model is the growth, which is the same in either account.
No. The monthly income shown is funded entirely by the projected savings balance and excludes Social Security, any pension, an annuity or continued earnings. For most US households that makes the figure a component of retirement income rather than the whole of it. It is included as an explicit omission because a tool that quietly added an assumed benefit would be inventing a number, and the benefit estimate depends on your own earnings record, which only the Social Security Administration can supply.
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Cluster us/investing · Unit us-retirement-savings-calculator · Engine compound-growth / retirement · Method: Balance is projected with monthly compounding on an ordinary annuity; monthly income is the balance multiplied by the withdrawal rate and divided by twelve, with no allowance for taxes, fees or market losses during drawdown.