About Retirement Payday
Retirement Payday is a free retirement calculator. You enter your age, savings, income, contribution rate, and expected spending, and it projects how your balance changes year by year — including the year it could run out.
Who makes it
This is an independent project built and maintained by one person in the United States. There is no company behind it, no team, and no affiliation with any bank, brokerage, insurer, or financial advisory firm.
Nobody here is a financial advisor. This site is not licensed to give financial, tax, or investment advice, and nothing on it is a recommendation about what you should do with your money.
As of this writing the site carries no advertising, no sponsored content, and no affiliate links. Nothing it shows you is influenced by a commission.
How the projection works
The calculator runs a year-by-year simulation rather than a single formula. Each year it applies your contributions, grows the balance at your assumed rate, and subtracts your expected spending, carrying the result into the following year.
Two assumptions matter more than the rest, and you can change both:
- Growth rate before and after retirement. These are separate. The default assumes a more aggressive allocation while you are working and a more conservative one afterwards, which is how most target-date strategies are built.
- Inflation. Expenses are grown over time rather than held flat, because a fixed spending figure understates what later years actually cost.
Everything runs in your browser as you type. No figure you enter is transmitted anywhere — see the privacy page for exactly what that means.
What it cannot tell you
A projection is arithmetic applied to guesses about the future, and the guesses do the heavy lifting. This model assumes a steady return every year. Real markets do not work that way, and the order of returns matters enormously: a severe loss in the first years of retirement does far more damage than the same loss later, even when the long-run average is identical.
The model also does not attempt to account for:
- Taxes, which vary by account type, state, and income
- Social Security, pensions beyond the simple input provided, or annuities
- Healthcare and long-term care costs, which rarely track general inflation
- Changes in contribution limits, tax law, or benefit rules
Treat the output as one input into your thinking, not an answer. If a real decision rests on it, take it to a qualified professional — the CFP Board maintains a free directory at letsmakeaplan.org.
Corrections
If you think a number or an assumption here is wrong, it is worth telling us — errors in this kind of content are the worst possible outcome, and a specific correction is genuinely useful.