The Retirement Living Standards suggests you need anywhere between £13k and £60k to live off once you retire. But every single person is different based on their circumstances. The types of holidays you go on, the size of your car, the size of your house, will all impact how much money you think you’ll need when you retire.
This calculator helps you work out how much you’ll need as a pension pot based on what you want your lifestyle to be when you retire. It’s fully flexible, so add in how much you want to earn each year, the age you want to retire, the rough age you want your pot to retire, assumed annual gain (this is preset at a 5% annual gain), and the assumed inflation (this is how much you expect your salary to increase each year due to inflation).
If you want to validate the number, the calculator also outputs a prompt for you to copy and paste into ChatGPT or Gemini to check. The numbers may not match exactly, but it’ll give you a good indication of what you’ll need.
Pension Pot Calculator
A few things to note:
- This assumes no state pension. So all payments will be taken from your private pension.
- This assumes today’s value. e.g. £30,000 today is unlikely to stretch the same amount when you decide to retire.
- This assumes you do not take out a tax-free lump sum from your pension. You’d have to add that on afterwards.