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Welcome to Calculate My Pension


Calculate My Pension is a brand new pension calculator inspired by the observation that other online calculators tend to be either:

Too Simple: Most online pension calculators are very basic calculators that will project your pension fund to retirement but don't take into account any other sources of income, leaving lots of questions unanswered.
Too Complicated: There are a few powerful cashflow modelling tools available that can give a more comprehensive view, but often take a long time to set up, consider more than just retirement planning and the results may be difficult to interpret, needing support from an advisor.
Calculate My Pension aims to get the balance right between these extremes. It is a powerful cashflow modelling tool focused only on retirement that is quick and simple to use. It has been designed to make the results as easy to understand as possible, without the need for a financial advisor. Calculate My Pension also aims to educate users about retirement planning:

FAQs: Answers to the most frequent questions are available on the FAQs page.
Ask the AI: There is also a friendly AI Assistant that has been carefully prompted to answer any questions about retirement planning in an appropriate manner.
Calculate My Pension is free to use but a premium version is available that has many more features.

What You'll Learn About Your Pension

Sustainable Retirement Income
Discover how much income you can afford to take in retirement without funds running out, given your current savings and ongoing contributions.
Fund Progression
Observe the future progression of your funds in a chart, growing up to retirement and then declining as you start taking income, targeted to reach zero by the age of your choice.
Retirement Income Breakdown
Analyse the breakdown of your retirement income between different sources in each retirement year, including your state pension, with different sources commencing payment at different ages.
The Effect of Assumptions
Premium members can alter the assumptions for fund growth, inflation and charges. Then see the effect of these changes on fund growth and projected retirement income.
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Premium Features

You can ask the premium AI anything about pensions or retirement planning in general and be confident that the answer is up to date with the latest information. The free AI has a knowledge cutoff of October 2023, but the premium AI's knowledge is fully up to date and is grounded with Google search. The premium AI also keeps your previous questions and answers, so you can refer back to them at any time.

What is Grounding with Google Search?

  • Connecting to Verifiable Sources: Grounding links the AI model's output to reliable information sources, reducing the chances of the model generating inaccurate or made-up content (hallucinations).
  • Improved Accuracy and Recency: By using Google Search, the model can access the latest information on the web, rather than relying on potentially outdated training data.
  • Citations and Transparency: Grounding includes citations and links to the sources used, allowing users to verify the information and understand where it came from.

Benefits of Grounding:

  • Improved Accuracy – Reduces the likelihood of hallucinated content.
  • Up-to-Date Information – Pulls in the most recent data via Google Search.
  • Greater Trust – Increases transparency by citing sources.
  • Efficient Use – Only uses Google Search when necessary, balancing speed and cost.

If you are planning to retire at the same time as your partner, it makes sense to coordinate your retirement planning. Coordinating you retirement planning allows you to:

Utilise both your contribution limits more effectively.
Maximise tax efficiency by taking income from the most tax efficient source.
Plan how best to allow for different state pension commencement ages.

The premium version allows you to enter your partner's details and see the effect of different retirement ages and income levels on both of your pensions.

It also provides the recommended combined income levels for the minimum, moderate and comfortable standards of living from the Retirement Living Standards website so that you can easily compare your projected combined income.

Fine-tuning assumptions for fund growth, inflation, and charges allows you to see how your retirement plan holds up under different conditions:

  • Fund Growth: Your future income depends heavily on how your investments perform. Adjusting this helps you explore best-case, worst-case, and average scenarios — giving you a more realistic picture of potential outcomes.

  • Inflation: After a long period of low inflation, the 2020s have seen inflation shocks that could not have been predicted. Entering higher inflation values will allow you to test how significantly future inflation affects your affordable retirement income. You will be surprised how devastating sustained higher inflation rates can be to your affordable income.

  • Fund Charges: Even small fees can have a big impact over decades. Adjusting fund charges helps you understand how much of your income might be lost to fees — and whether switching to lower-cost investments could improve your results.

A crash in the stock market just before or just after retirement can have a devastating effect on your pension fund and what you can afford to take as income. The premium version allows you to model the effect of a fall in your fund values of a specfied percent at a specfied age.

From that you can work out how many more years you need to work to recover from the crash, or how much less you can afford to take as income.

The premium version could save you paying unnessesary tax on your retirement income. It allows you to find the optimum mix of income from your pension and your ISA to minimise the amount of tax you pay over the long term.

You can also see the effect of taking a tax free lump sum at retirement on the overall tax you pay in the long term versus retaing your tax free percent for future income.

Three key metrics are calculated which you can view on the dashboard:

  • Initial Income Yield: This tells you how effectively your savings are being converted into income at the start of retirement. You can compare this figure to the 4% rule , a widely used rule of thumb for sustainable withdrawals.

  • Total Future Tax Rate: This shows how much tax you will pay as a percentage of your retirement income over your whole retirement. It’s useful for planning the most tax-efficient mix of withdrawal between pensions and ISAs. This is particularly true when planning as a couple as you can easily see who is paying the most tax.

  • Total Fund Charges Rate: This gives the total amount you will pay in fund charges as a percentage of your retirement income over your whole retirement. This can be surprisingly high and will demonstrate the value of lower-cost options, significantly improving your long-term income.

If you are still paying off a mortgage or have children at home, your retirement planning may include an increase in pension contributions at a certain age. This is possible with the premium version.

If the results tell you that your affordable retirement income is less than you need, this feature provides another way you can increase your initial income.

By setting income reductions in the laters years of your retirement, you can see how this frees up funds to allow a higher income in the early years.

You will be able to specify two percentage drops in income at specified ages. Your affordable income is automatically recalculated to see the effect.

If you have a defined benefit pension that allows early retirement, the premium version allows you to investigate retiring early at different ages.

It will allow you to input the early retirement factors specific to your scheme. You can then see the effect of taking a reduced income at different ages and how that affects your overall retirement income level as well as its tax efficiency.

Purchasing an annuity provides you with a guaranteed income for life and reduced sensitivity to market fluctuations. But it may also give you a higher affordable income than drawdown! Find out with the annuity purchase feature. This allows you to specify:

Annuity Purchase Age
Percentage of Fund to Convert

The model assumes that the tax free cash for that portion of your fund is taken and moved into your ISA as soon as you allowances permit.

You can calibrate the annuity rate calculator to current market rates using the Annuity Rate Calibration Tool.

Access to three additional charts relating to tax payments:

  • Tax By Tax Band: See the breakdown of your tax payments in each retirement year split by tax band. This makes it easy to see how you might adjust your plans to reduce overall tax payments.

  • Tax By Source: See how tax is calculated on each source of your income.

  • Tax Free Allowance: See the cumulative tax free allowance as up to 25% of your pension income is tax free but only up to a lifetime maximum of £268,275. When this limit is reached you will see a significant increase in tax, so it is worth considering adjustments to your drawdown plan to avoid this.

See the actual figures behind the charts set out in tables.

For your pension fund and ISA, see the opening and closing balances for each year and a breakdown of all the items that make up the movement.

For your retirement income, see the gross and net values of each source of income. The gross value of pension fund income agrees with the pension fund table and the next values agrees with the figures in the charts.

Tax Calculator: The premium version includes a tax calculator that allows you to see the effect of different income levels on your tax and national insurance.

Salary Sacrifice Calculator: It also includes a salary sacrifice calculator that allows you to see the effect of salary sacrifice on your take home pay and pension contributions.

More calculators will be added in the future.

Premium members can log in at a later date and resume their investigation with the same inputs from where they left off. There is a button to clear all inputs and start again if required. The inputs are stored securely and are not shared with any third parties.