Discover the level of income that you can afford throughout your retirement, based on your target retirement age, your current pension fund and future contributions. The calculation takes into account your pensions, ISAs and other income, as well as your state pension entitlement.

Easily compare your affordable retirement income with 3 standards of living in retirement based on research presented in the Retirement Living Standards website. See whether you are on track for a surplus in retirement or facing a shortfall.

Tailor your retirement income needs in line with your own circumstances or preferences, using the same categories as the Retirement Living Standards website. You can select a Minimum, Moderate or Comfortable standard for each category of spending — or specify an exact figure using the sliders.

See how your affordable retirement income varies under the three investment growth scenarios prescribed by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA): Low, Intermediate and High. These scenarios match the assumptions used in the pension projections you receive in your annual statements.

See how your retirement income is affected by different annual charge levels on your pension fund and ISA. Choose between Low (0.5%), Moderate (0.75%), and High (1.0%) charge scenarios, and view the impact on your projected fund values and sustainable income.

Choose to reduce the percentage of your salary going into your pension and instead receive that amount as additional net pay to be added to your ISA. Instantly see how this choice affects your retirement income and the value of tax relief you are giving up in return for more flexibility.

Adjust the key inputs and instantaneously see how it affects your affordable retirement income and any surplus or shortfall.

• Contributions: See how increasing your monthly savings increases your affordable retirement income.


• Target Retirement Age: Explore the impact of retiring earlier or later on your affordable retirement income and how it affects your surplus or deficit.


• Projection Term: The default prescribed by the FCA is to project income to age 99, but you may feel this is too cautious. See the effect of a lower final age on your affordable retirement income.

Three key charts are available to view on the Dashboard if you register for free:

• Income Breakdown: A colour-coded bar chart of your income in retirement split by source (pensions, ISAs, state pension, etc.) for each year of retirement.


• Fund Values: This chart illustrates how your pension fund and ISA grow before retirement and then are used up during retirement, ending up at zero at your selected end-of-projection age.


• Charges: Understand the effect of charges on your fund over time, both before and after retirement, with this dedicated charges chart.

Choose between different views of your results to suit your preference.

• Today’s or Future Money: Choose whether you want your results shown in today's money, removing the effect of inflation, or in projected future terms. This can help you to better understand what your retirement income will really be worth.


• Monthly or Annual Income: Toggle between viewing your income and needs as monthly or annual figures for easier planning and comparison.

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

• Retirement Income: View the gross and net values of each source of income.


• Pension Fund and ISA Cashflow: View the opening and closing balances for each year and a breakdown of all the items that make up the movement.

View a calculation of the average life expectancy for someone of your current age and sex to help plan how long your retirement income needs to last.

Explore concise answers to the most frequently asked questions about retirement planning, grouped neatly by category. This is a great starting point for if you are looking to understand pensions and retirement planning.

Even if you're not sure what questions to ask yet, the FAQs page can guide you to the key topics and help you build your knowledge.

Tax Calculator: View a breakdown of tax and national insurance calculations. See the split of tax between the various tax bands. See the different calculation for the Scottish tax regime.

Salary Sacrifice Calculator: View a breakdown of a salary sacrifice calculation. See the effect on your take home pay and pension contributions on differing levels of salary sacrifice.

Our advanced AI solution combines answers from GPT4.1 and Claude Sonnet 4.0, cross-checking them using Gemini 2.0 Flash and real-time Google searches to ensure accuracy and up-to-date information.

Project your partner's pension (and other retirement provisions) alongside your own and see a combined affordable retirement income, based on the assumption that you and your partner retire at the same time.

Explore the effect of switching your contributions to your partner, or vice versa, to maximise tax efficiency.

Compare this with the recommended combined income levels for a couple for the Minimum, Moderate and Comfortable standards of living from the Retirement Living Standards website.

Instead of being restricted to the three FCA growth scenarios, the premium version gives you full freedom to adjust the model assumptions. Adjust assumptions for fund growth, inflation, and charges to see the effect on your retirement plans under different conditions. The FCA scenarios do not allow for a high-inflation, low-growth outcome, which is what we are currently experiencing.

• 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 specified percent at a specified age.

From that you can work out how many more years you would need to work to recover from a crash, or how much less income you would be able to afford.

Vary the mix of income between pension and ISA, to find the optimum mix to minimise the amount of tax you pay over the long term.

The free version automatically uses pension income up to the personal allowance to maximise tax-free income. But this feature goes a step further and allows you to adjust the proportion of your basic rate band taken as pension income, taking the rest from your ISA, minimising the total tax you pay over your whole retirement.

As your affordable income is calculated based on your whole retirement, minimising tax in the long term increases your affordable retirement income.

Investigate converting a proportion of your pension fund to an annuity at an age of your choice, seeing the amount of income you would give up in exchange for the certainty of a guaranteed income for life.

You can calibrate the annuity rate calculations to market rates for your own specific circumstances using the Annuity Rate Calibration Tool.

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. Specify the age at which you plan to increase your contributions and the amount of the increase. You can do this for you pension and your ISA.

Reducing the level of income you plan to take in the later years of retirement frees up funds to allow a higher income in the early years.

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.

You can input the early retirement factors specific to your scheme to see the effect of taking a reduced income at different ages and how that affects your overall retirement income.

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.

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.

A built-in AI assistant on the dashboard page that can help you understand your results, answer questions related to your retirement plan, and suggest scenarios to try.

Currently, the model can only handle a single ISA type, either cash or stocks and shares. Enabling simulatneous modelling of both cash ISAs and stocks and shares ISAs is more realistic, but also allows the crash-resilient drawdown strategy in the next feature.

Holding a cash buffer can reduce the impact of a market crash. Here's how this strategy would work:

• Specify the size of a cash buffer in terms of the number of months of future income to be held in cash.
• Divestment of funds into cash would be modelled to keep the same number of months income available in cash.
• Divestment would be paused automatically under a market crash scenario and resumed when the cash is used up. By that time the market will have recovered some of the losses.

This allows you to see the reduction in income resulting from a higher level of cash, but also the reduced impact on income in the event of a market crash.

Model possible scenarios of changes to government policy such as extended freezes to income tax bands or a reduction in the tax-free lump sum limit. Also model a increase in the State Pension Age.

Currently it is assumed that any tax-free lump sum taken is spent immediately. This feature would allow the lump sum to be gradually transferred into your ISA, allowing for annual contribution limits over time.

A lower growth rate would apply to the funds sitting outside the ISA to reflect the tax payable until such time that all the funds can be transferred into the ISA.

A tool to help you understand how the transfer value of your defined benefit pension is calculated, to help you decide whether it is value for money.

Find out whether it’s worth paying voluntary contributions to boost your State Pension.

Download a customised PDF of your results under selected scenarios, including charts, tables and assumptions, ready to print or share.

This tool will allow users to enter a start year and an end year, and see the average inflation and investment returns over that period. Users will be able to select from various indices using dropdown menus to tailor the results to specific historical datasets.

Currently, the simplified method for calculating state pension age can be up to 11 months out for people born in the tax years 1960/61 and 1977/78 (tax years start on 6th April). This feature will detect if a user was potentially born in these tax years and decide whether to show an additional input of birth month for a state pension age calculation that is accurate to the nearest month. It will also allow for part-year amounts to be paid in the first year of payment, reflecting the state pension ages that are occur between birthdays.