How much money do you need to retire?

Step 1: Estimate your annual retirement spending

Start from your actual spending over the last twelve months, not your income. The two diverge the day you retire, because several expenses disappear and a couple of new ones show up.

What typically ends: commuting, the 7.65% FICA payroll tax, your own retirement contributions, and a mortgage once it's paid off. What typically starts: health insurance before Medicare at 65, and often more travel early on. Net the two against your spending for a working number.

Step 2: Subtract Social Security and any pension

This is the step every rule of thumb skips, and it moves your number the most. The average retired worker collected $2,084.40 a month from Social Security in June 2026, or $25,013 a year.¹

At $40,000 a year in spending, that benefit covers about 62.5% of it. At $120,000, it covers about 21%. Claiming later raises the benefit itself, up to age 70, and that's its own decision.

Step 3: Divide by your withdrawal rate

Divide the gap Social Security doesn't cover by the annual percentage you're willing to draw from your portfolio. Safe withdrawal rates typically run 3% to 5%: lower is more conservative, higher draws the balance down faster. Neither end is "right," it's a tradeoff between spending now and certainty later.

William Bengen's 1994 analysis is where the 4% figure comes from, tested over a 30-year retirement. The rate you pick works as a straight divisor:

Those three steps are the whole calculation, and the retirement calculator runs them against your own spending, benefit and withdrawal rate instead of the averages the tables below use.

How much a single person needs to retire

These targets for a single person assume the average Social Security benefit of $25,013 a year.

How much a married couple needs to retire

These targets for a married couple assume both spouses claim at the average benefit, $50,026 combined.

How much you need to retire before 65

Retire at 58 and you face several years with no Social Security and no Medicare, both of which the formula above assumes have started. The fix is arithmetic: a bridge fund sized as your full annual spending times the years before that income starts.

Health insurance is the other piece: you're on your own for coverage until Medicare eligibility at 65, where the standard Part B premium runs $202.90 a month in 2026.²

How long your retirement savings need to last

Retire at 55 and your money may need to last 40 years, past the 30-year stretch the 4% figure was tested against. That argues for the lower end of the withdrawal-rate range, raising your target.

Fidelity's own savings multiples shift with planned retirement age for the same reason, built around planning through age 93:

The multiple falls as retirement age rises: more years to grow, fewer years to cover, a larger benefit at the end. Delaying from 67 to 70 raises that benefit to 124% of your full retirement age amount, at 8% a year.³ That's its own decision.

How taxes on retirement withdrawals change your number

A dollar in a traditional 401(k) or IRA isn't a spendable dollar: withdrawals are taxed as ordinary income, so the balance has to cover your spending and the tax bill. A Roth IRA and a taxable brokerage account work differently, so identical totals can need different targets. The Roth conversion calculator shows how shifting money between them changes what you owe.

Required minimum distributions eventually force the issue, starting at 73 or 75 depending on your birth year. The RMD calculator shows when that starts for you and how much it forces out.

Health care costs in retirement

Health care isn't a fund you set aside once, it's an ongoing line in your spending. The standard Part B premium is $202.90 a month in 2026, with a $283 annual deductible.

Medicare doesn't cover everything, so out-of-pocket costs belong in your spending estimate. Every figure on this page excludes long-term custodial care, a separate and larger risk to plan for.

How retirement spending changes with age

The tables above hold spending flat for 30 years, this page's most conservative assumption. Real household spending tends to fall as retirement goes on.

Health care spending moves the other way as people age, part of why the decline is smaller than these numbers suggest.⁴ Treat a flat-spending target as conservative, not wrong.

How inflation and investment returns affect your retirement number

Inflation is already built into your retirement number: the withdrawal rate assumes annual cost-of-living increases, so don't add a separate adjustment. What that rate can't protect you from is sequence-of-returns risk: a bad market in your first few retirement years does more damage than the same downturn a decade later, because those early withdrawals lock in losses a portfolio never recovers from.

Think of every number on this page as the center of a range, not a fixed target.

What percentage of your income to save for retirement

Large plan providers commonly suggest saving 10% to 15% of pre-tax income, including any match. The rate that actually matters is whichever one closes your own gap.

The $11,250 super catch-up for ages 60 to 63 replaces the standard $8,000 catch-up, it doesn't stack on top of it, and it stops applying at 64.⁵

How much you should have saved for retirement by age

Here's what most coverage of this table leaves out: 10x salary at 67 is built to replace about 45% of pre-retirement income, not all of it. The math confirms it, 10 times salary at a 4.5% withdrawal rate equals 45% of that salary at every income level, exactly what the multiple was solved for. Fidelity's stated assumptions: a 15% savings rate from 25, a target-date equity glide path, retirement at 67, planning through 93, and no pension income.

How to catch up if you're behind on retirement savings

Catching up when you're behind on retirement savings comes down to four levers, and they're not equally powerful. Saving more helps, but the one people underrate is cutting planned spending: trimming $10,000 a year off your target lowers your required portfolio by $250,000 at 4%, or $285,714 at 3.5%. Nothing else moves the number by that much for that little effort.

The other two: working longer, which shortens how many years your portfolio has to cover, and delaying Social Security, which raises the income offsetting your spending.

Where the money sits is a weaker lever than any of those four, but it isn't a free one, because a fee compounds against you the same way returns compound for you. Our Robinhood review and Empower review both work through what holding the account actually costs.