How much money do you need to retire?

Step 1: Estimate your annual retirement spending

Start from what you spent over the last twelve months, not your income. Spending and income 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. Subtract the expenses that end and add the ones that start to get a working spending estimate. Tools that read your spending across every institution can do this first step for you, and our CFO Silvia review covers one.

Step 2: Subtract Social Security and any pension

This step moves your number the most, and the 25x rule of thumb leaves it out. 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 that spending. At $120,000, it covers about 21%. Claiming later, up to age 70, raises the benefit itself. When to claim is a separate 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." The withdrawal rate is a tradeoff between spending now and certainty later.

William Bengen's 1994 analysis is where the 4% rule 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. To cover those years, set aside a bridge fund equal to 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. A longer retirement argues for the lower end of the withdrawal-rate range, which raises your target. If you plan to stop working far earlier, the guide to the FIRE movement covers how people plan for an early retirement.

Fidelity's own savings multiples shift with planned retirement age for the same reason. Fidelity's multiples assume you plan 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 your Social Security benefit to 124% of your full retirement age amount, at 8% a year.³ When to claim is a separate decision.

How taxes on retirement withdrawals change your number

A traditional 401(k) or IRA balance is not all spendable: 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 moving money from a traditional account to a Roth changes what you owe.

Required minimum distributions eventually force withdrawals, starting at 73 or 75 depending on your birth year. The RMD calculator shows when RMDs start for you and how much you'll have to withdraw, and the RMD table shows the share of the balance each age has to take out.

Health care costs in retirement

Health care is an ongoing line in your spending, not a fund you set aside once. 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. The withdrawal rate doesn't protect you from 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 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 rather than adding to it, and the super catch-up stops applying at 64.⁵

How much you should have saved for retirement by age

The 10x salary target at 67 is built to replace about 45% of pre-retirement income. The math confirms this: 10 times salary at a 4.5% withdrawal rate equals 45% of that salary at every income level, which is 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

Four things help you catch up when you're behind on retirement savings, and they don't help equally. Saving more helps, but the one people underrate is cutting planned spending: trimming $10,000 a year off your planned spending lowers your required portfolio by $250,000 at 4%, or $285,714 at 3.5%. No other change reduces your target 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.

To see how your current total compares with other families your age, check the Federal Reserve's figures for net worth by age.

Your choice of provider matters less than any of those four, but fees still cost you, 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 costs.