Retirement Calculator
By Baolin Gong, AFP · Founder, USFinCalc · Reviewed against primary sources (IRS, SSA, state revenue authorities).
A retirement calculator projects your 401(k) or IRA balance at retirement by compounding your current savings and yearly contributions at an expected rate of return. It adds any employer match to your contributions, then adjusts the final balance for inflation to show what it is really worth in today's dollars. This tool shows both the future balance and that inflation-adjusted value.
Project your 401(k) or IRA balance to retirement — with employer match, annual contributions, expected return, and what it's really worth in today's dollars.
Balance growth to retirement
Your projected balance by age. The gap between the total balance and the contributions line is compound investment growth — the longer the horizon, the wider it gets.
How this retirement calculator works
This calculator projects your retirement savings one year at a time. Each year, your existing balance grows by your expected return, then that year's contributions are added — both your own (a percentage of salary) and your employer's match. It runs that loop from your current age to your retirement age, then shows two numbers that matter: the nominal balance you'll see on your statement, and the inflation-adjusted balance in today's dollars so you know what it will actually buy.
The biggest driver of the final number is usually time, not the amount you save. Because returns compound, a dollar invested at 30 has decades to grow, while a dollar invested at 55 does not. That is why starting early — even with small contributions — so often beats saving more later.
Don't leave the employer match on the table
An employer match is the closest thing to free money in personal finance. A common formula is 50% of your contributions up to 6% of salary. On a $90,000 salary, contributing 6% ($5,400) earns a $2,700 employer match — an instant 50% return before the market does anything. If you contribute less than the cap, you forfeit part of that match every single year.
This calculator caps the match at the smaller of your contribution rate and the match limit, so you can see exactly how much employer money you're capturing. Try setting your contribution below the limit and watch the employer-match total fall — that gap is money you're walking away from.
Why the inflation-adjusted number matters
A projected balance of $1.5 million sounds life-changing, but if it's 35 years away, inflation will have eroded much of its purchasing power. At 2.5% inflation, prices roughly double every 28 years. The inflation-adjusted figure restates your future balance in today's dollars, giving you an honest sense of the lifestyle it could support. Use the nominal number to track your account; use the real number to plan your life.
Once you know your trajectory, tune the levers. See how raising your contribution affects your take-home pay today, factor in any after-tax RSU income you could invest, and make sure big purchases like a home still leave room to save. Retirement projections are estimates — markets are volatile and tax rules change, so revisit your plan yearly and consult a fiduciary advisor for decisions.
Worked example: what five years of waiting costs
Take a saver earning $90,000 who contributes 10% of salary with a typical match (50% up to 6% of salary — $11,700 a year combined), earns 7% annually, and retires at 65. Starting from a $0 balance, here is the ending balance by the age they begin, using this calculator's year-by-year compounding:
| Starting age | Years of saving | Balance at 65 (nominal) | In today's dollars (2.5% inflation) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 25 | 40 | $2,335,731 | $869,898 |
| 30 | 35 | $1,617,371 | $681,514 |
| 35 | 30 | $1,105,191 | $526,892 |
| 40 | 25 | $740,014 | $399,156 |
| 45 | 20 | $479,647 | $292,715 |
Every row uses identical contributions — $11,700 a year. The 25-year-old ends with nearly five times the 45-year-old's balance, and the difference between starting at 25 and 30 is about $718,000, even though the extra five years of contributions total only $58,500. The other $660,000 is compounding. This is the single most important fact in retirement math: the calendar is a bigger lever than the contribution rate, and it only moves in one direction.
Contribution rate still matters, of course — especially crossing the match threshold. In the same scenario starting at 30 with a $50,000 balance, contributing 3% instead of 6% doesn't just halve your own savings; it forfeits half the employer match too, and the ending balance drops from about $1.65 million to $1.09 million. The most efficient dollar you can save is always the one that unlocks employer matching — our 401(k) match guide works through the common formulas.
Two practical notes on reading your own projection. First, the expected-return field is doing heavy lifting: at 35 years, the difference between assuming 6% and 8% is roughly a doubling of the ending balance, so it's worth running both a conservative and an optimistic case rather than anchoring on one number. Second, these projections assume you never pause. Real careers include job changes, and the most common leak is the gap between jobs when contributions stop and, worse, small balances get cashed out — a $20,000 cash-out at 35 costs about $152,000 of balance at 65 at 7% growth, before counting the taxes and the 10% early-withdrawal penalty paid to get it. Rolling old accounts into an IRA or the new employer's plan keeps the compounding table above intact.