Retirement Calculator

It depends entirely on your current monthly expenses, how many years until you retire, and how long your retirement lasts — there's no single number that applies to everyone. This calculator projects your current expenses forward with inflation to your retirement date, then works out the corpus needed to fund that inflated expense level for your full expected retirement duration, rather than using a generic multiple of your salary.

Inflation compounds for decades before you retire, and keeps compounding after you retire too — your expenses in retirement won't be your expenses today, they'll be much higher in rupee terms even if your lifestyle doesn't change. A monthly expense of ₹50,000 today becomes roughly ₹2.87 lakh after 30 years at 6% inflation. Ignoring this is the single biggest reason simple retirement estimates (like "20 times your salary") fall short.

Most planners assume a more conservative return after retirement than before it, since retirees typically shift toward safer, lower-volatility investments to protect the corpus they're actively drawing down. A common range is 6-8% p.a. post-retirement versus 9-12% p.a. pre-retirement, but these are assumptions you should adjust based on your own risk tolerance and asset allocation — not guarantees.

This calculator shows the additional monthly investment needed, on top of what you're already contributing, to close the gap by your planned retirement age. If that number feels unrealistic, the usual levers are: retiring later (giving your existing savings more time to compound and shortening the retirement duration you need to fund), reducing planned retirement expenses, or accepting a higher-return, higher-risk investment mix — each of which you can test by changing the inputs above.

This Retirement Calculator answers "how much do I need to retire at my planned age, for a specific expected life expectancy?" The FIRE Calculator answers a different question: "when can I become financially independent and stop working early, using an open-ended safe-withdrawal-rate framework rather than a fixed retirement age and bounded life expectancy?" If you're planning a conventional retirement around 60, use this calculator; if you're aiming to retire well before that, the FIRE Calculator is built for that specific goal.