How Long Will My Money Last? Retirement Savings Calculator

How Long Will My Money Last? Retirement Savings Calculator

How long will my money last is the question that keeps people awake the night before they retire, and it is the one question a savings balance on its own cannot answer. Two people can each have $500,000 and get answers twenty years apart, because the balance is only one of five moving parts. The calculator above takes all five, runs your money month by month to age 105, and tells you the age your savings hit zero, along with the exact years you buy back from each change you could make.

If you want the short version first, here it is.

How long will my money last: the quick answer

The table below shows how long a lump sum lasts when you draw a fixed amount every month, before any Social Security. It assumes 5% average annual growth, 3% inflation raising your spending every year, a 10% effective tax on withdrawals, and that you start at 65.

Those numbers look bleak because they leave out the single largest source of retirement income most people have. Add Social Security and the same balances stretch dramatically, which is why the calculator asks for it before anything else. There is a second table further down showing the difference it makes.

How long will my money last in retirement? The five things that decide it

Every honest answer to how long will my retirement savings last comes from the same five inputs. Get these right and the arithmetic is straightforward. Guess at them and any calculator, including this one, is just producing a confident-looking number.

1. What you actually have

Add every account you would genuinely spend down: 401k and 403b balances, traditional and Roth IRAs, taxable brokerage accounts, cash and CDs. Do not include your home unless you plan to sell it and live somewhere cheaper, and do not include an emergency fund you intend to keep untouched. The number you enter should be money you are willing to convert into groceries.

2. What you actually spend

This is where most plans go wrong, and it goes wrong in a specific direction: people enter what they think they should spend rather than what they do spend. The average household headed by someone 65 or older spends roughly $60,000 a year, which is about $5,000 a month, and that figure includes people living very frugally. Pull three months of bank and card statements, add them up, divide by three. Include the annual and irregular costs people forget, spread across twelve months: property taxes, insurance premiums, car replacement, dental work, travel, gifts, and the deductibles and co-pays that come with getting older.

3. Social Security and other income

Every dollar of income you receive is a dollar you do not withdraw, and its effect compounds because the money you did not withdraw stays invested. The average retired worker receives roughly $2,000 a month from Social Security. Your own figure is on your statement at ssa.gov, and it is worth getting the real number rather than estimating, because the difference between a $1,600 benefit and a $2,600 benefit can be a decade of extra runway. Pensions, annuity payments, rental income and part-time earnings all belong here too.

4. Growth versus inflation

Your savings keep earning while you spend them, which is why $500,000 at $4,000 a month lasts longer than the ten and a half years simple division suggests. But inflation is pulling in the opposite direction: if prices rise 3% a year, the $4,000 you spend today costs $5,376 in ten years and $7,224 in twenty. A plan that ignores inflation overstates how long your money lasts by years. The calculator raises your spending every year by default, and you can switch that off to see the answer in today’s dollars only.

On growth, a diversified portfolio that still holds meaningful stock exposure in retirement has historically returned somewhere in the region of 5% to 7% a year before inflation. A very conservative bond-and-cash portfolio returns less. The default here is 5%, which is deliberately unexciting.

5. Taxes

Withdrawals from a traditional 401k or IRA are taxed as ordinary income, so taking $4,000 to spend means withdrawing more than $4,000. Roth withdrawals are generally tax-free. Taxable brokerage accounts are taxed only on gains, usually at capital gains rates. A blended effective rate of 10% to 15% is a reasonable starting assumption for most retirees drawing mainly from pre-tax accounts, but if all your money is in a Roth you should set this to zero, and that alone can add more than a year to the answer.

How long will my retirement savings last at each withdrawal rate?

Rather than a dollar amount, it often helps to think in percentages. The table below takes $1 million and shows how long it lasts at each first-year withdrawal rate, with 5% growth, 3% inflation and no tax. The percentages work the same way at any balance, so a 5% rate on $400,000 lasts as long as a 5% rate on $4 million.

This is where the famous 4% rule comes from. It was derived in the mid-1990s by testing withdrawal rates against actual historical market returns, and 4% was the highest starting rate that survived every rolling 30-year period tested, including retirements that began just before major crashes. The rule was never a promise of perpetual money. It was an answer to a narrow question: what rate would have worked for 30 years, even in the worst case on record. If you retire at 60 and plan for 35 years, or if returns over your retirement are worse than any past period, 4% is less safe than it sounds. If you retire at 70, it is conservative.

How long will my money last with Social Security?

This table repeats the first one, with a $2,000 monthly Social Security benefit starting at 67 and rising with inflation. Everything else is identical.

Look at the $500,000 row at $4,000 a month: ten years and four months becomes twenty years and four months. Social Security doubled the runway. At $3,000 a month it turns a fourteen-year plan into one that never runs out at all, because the benefit covers most of the spending and the remaining balance grows faster than the gap. Nothing else in retirement planning has that kind of leverage, which is why when to claim is such a consequential decision.

Claiming early at 62 permanently reduces your benefit by about 30% compared with a full retirement age of 67. Delaying past full retirement age adds roughly 8% a year until 70, so a benefit worth $2,000 at 67 is worth about $2,480 at 70. If you are healthy, have longevity in the family, and can bridge the gap with savings or part-time work, delaying is usually the highest-return decision available to a retiree.

How long will $500,000 last in retirement?

With no other income, $500,000 lasts about ten years and four months at $4,000 a month, or fourteen years and four months at $3,000. With a $2,000 Social Security benefit from 67 it lasts about twenty years and four months at $4,000 a month, and it stops running out entirely below roughly $3,300 a month.

The practical reading is this: half a million dollars is a comfortable retirement for someone whose fixed costs are low, who owns a home outright, and who claims a decent Social Security benefit. It is not enough on its own to fund a $6,000-a-month lifestyle from 62 onward. If your target is closer to the second picture, the levers section below shows exactly which changes close the gap fastest.

How long will $400,000 last in retirement?

About eight years and two months at $4,000 a month with no other income, or roughly eleven years and three months at $3,000 a month. With a $2,000 monthly Social Security benefit starting at 67, $400,000 supports around $3,600 a month more or less indefinitely.

How long will $750,000 last in retirement?

About sixteen years and five months at $4,000 a month with no other income, and twelve years and eight months at $5,000. With Social Security added it stretches to roughly thirty-six years at $4,000 a month, which for most people means it simply does not run out.

How long will $1 million last in retirement?

A million dollars lasts about twenty-three years at $4,000 a month with no other income, seventeen years and nine months at $5,000, and fourteen years and four months at $6,000. Add a typical Social Security benefit and $4,000 a month becomes sustainable indefinitely, while $5,000 a month runs for roughly thirty-one years.

Put differently: a million dollars reliably supports somewhere between $40,000 and $50,000 a year of inflation-adjusted spending on top of Social Security, for a retirement of normal length. That is a comfortable middle-class retirement in most of the country and a tight one in the most expensive metros. The million-dollar figure has cultural weight, but it is not a finish line so much as a rough equivalent of a $40,000 pension that keeps pace with inflation.

How long will $2 million or $3 million last in retirement?

Two million dollars lasts about thirty-four years at $6,000 a month with no other income at all, and does not run out at $5,000 a month or below. At $8,000 a month it runs roughly twenty-three years, or nearly thirty-three years once Social Security is included. Three million dollars sustains $8,000 a month indefinitely on these assumptions and only begins to deplete above roughly $11,000 a month.

At these balances the binding constraint is usually not longevity but spending discipline, taxes and required minimum distributions. Once you turn 73, the rules force a minimum withdrawal from traditional retirement accounts each year whether or not you need the money, which pushes taxable income up. Retirees at this level often benefit from converting portions of a traditional IRA to a Roth in the low-income years between retiring and claiming Social Security.

How long will my 401k last?

A 401k lasts exactly as long as any other pot of the same size, with one difference that matters: nearly every dollar coming out is taxable as ordinary income. If you need $4,000 a month to spend and your effective tax rate is 12%, you are actually withdrawing about $4,545 a month. Over twenty years that gap is well over $100,000 of extra withdrawals, which is why the tax setting in the calculator changes the answer more than people expect.

Three further things shorten a 401k specifically. Withdrawals before 59 and a half generally carry a 10% penalty on top of income tax, with limited exceptions. Required minimum distributions begin at 73 and force money out on a schedule that is not yours. And plan fees, which are invisible on a statement, quietly reduce your growth rate. If your plan charges 0.7% a year in total costs, enter 4.3% growth rather than 5% and see what it does to the years.

How long will my money last with systematic withdrawals?

A systematic withdrawal plan simply means taking money out on a fixed schedule rather than ad hoc. There are three common approaches, and they behave very differently when markets misbehave.

Fixed dollar withdrawals

You take the same inflation-adjusted amount every year regardless of what the portfolio does. This is what the 4% rule describes and what the calculator on this page models. It gives you a predictable income, and it carries all the risk: if markets fall 30% in your second year, you keep withdrawing the same amount from a much smaller balance.

Fixed percentage withdrawals

You take a set percentage of the current balance each year, say 4.5%. Your money mathematically never runs out, because you are always taking a slice of what remains rather than a fixed sum. The trade-off is income that swings with the market, and a bad year means an immediate pay cut.

Guardrail withdrawals

You start with a fixed amount but agree in advance to trim spending, often by around 10%, if your withdrawal rate climbs past a ceiling, and to give yourself a raise if it drops below a floor. Research on this approach suggests it supports a meaningfully higher starting withdrawal rate than the rigid version, because you are promising to react rather than sail into the rocks. In practice most retirees do some version of this instinctively, spending less in a bad year without ever calling it a strategy.

What actually makes your money last longer

The calculator prices every one of these against your own numbers, but the ranking is fairly stable. Here is what each change is worth for someone with $500,000 spending $4,000 a month from 65, whose money otherwise lasts ten years and four months.

Two lessons fall out of that table. The first is that income beats returns, by a wide margin: claiming Social Security well is worth roughly eight times more than picking investments that beat the market by two percentage points a year. The second is that spending is the lever you control completely and immediately, while growth and inflation are things you can only hope about.

There is a third option people underrate, which is working part-time in the first years of retirement. Earning $1,000 a month for five years is $60,000 you never withdraw, and because it comes out of the years when your balance is largest and has the longest left to compound, it is worth considerably more than the same $60,000 found later.

The risk this calculator cannot show you

Every calculator of this kind, including this one, applies a steady average return. Real markets do not work that way, and the order in which returns arrive matters enormously once you are withdrawing rather than contributing. Two retirees can experience identical average returns over thirty years and end up in completely different places if one of them met a bad market in year two and the other met it in year twenty-two. Selling assets to fund living costs while prices are down permanently removes shares that would have participated in the recovery. This is called sequence of returns risk, and it is the main reason planners suggest holding one to three years of spending in cash or short-term bonds, so that you never have to sell into a falling market for grocery money.

Treat any single number from any retirement calculator as a central estimate rather than a forecast. The useful output is not the exact age your money runs out; it is the direction and size of the gap, and how much each available change closes it.

How to use the how long will my money last calculator

1. Tap a savings amount at the top for an instant answer, or enter your own figure.
2. Enter what you genuinely spend each month, taken from real statements rather than a budget you intend to follow.
3. Add your Social Security benefit and the age you plan to claim. This changes the answer more than any other input.
4. Add any pension, annuity, rental income or part-time earnings, with the ages they start and stop.
5. Open the advanced settings if you want to adjust growth, inflation, the tax rate on withdrawals, or to model spending that slows down in your late seventies and eighties, which is what most retirees actually experience.
6. Read the headline answer, then work down the list of changes. Each one is measured against your own numbers, so you can see whether spending less, claiming later or working longer is the better use of your effort.
7. Use the year-by-year table to see exactly what happens to your balance in each year, and print or save the whole plan.

Nothing you enter leaves your browser. There is no sign-up, no email, and no data stored anywhere.

Related calculators and planners

If you are still building rather than spending, the savings by age calculator at works out what you should have put aside by your current age and what monthly amount closes the gap. To find room in your budget for a bigger contribution, the 50/30/20 budget calculator at splits your take-home pay across needs, wants and savings, and the budget spreadsheet maker builds a tracker you can keep. If debt payments are eating the money that should be funding retirement, the debt snowball calculator at shows the fastest order to clear them.

Frequently asked questions

How long will my money last in retirement?

It depends on five things: how much you have, how much you spend each month, how much Social Security and other income you receive, what your savings earn after inflation, and the tax you pay on withdrawals. As a rough guide, $500,000 lasts about ten years at $4,000 a month with no other income, and about twenty years once a typical Social Security benefit is included. The calculator on this page runs your own figures month by month and gives you the age your savings hit zero.

How long will $500,000 last in retirement?

About ten years and four months at $4,000 a month with no other income, assuming 5% growth, 3% inflation and 10% tax on withdrawals. With a $2,000 monthly Social Security benefit from age 67 it lasts around twenty years and four months, and at $3,300 a month or less it does not run out at all.

How long will $1 million last in retirement?

Roughly twenty-three years at $4,000 a month, seventeen years and nine months at $5,000 a month, and fourteen years and four months at $6,000 a month, before any other income. Adding a typical Social Security benefit makes $4,000 a month sustainable indefinitely and stretches $5,000 a month to around thirty-one years.

How long will $2 million last in retirement?

Two million dollars supports $5,000 a month indefinitely with no other income, lasts about thirty-four years at $6,000 a month, and about twenty-three years at $8,000 a month. With Social Security included, $8,000 a month runs for roughly thirty-three years.

How long will my 401k last?

The same as any balance of the same size, except that withdrawals are taxed as ordinary income, so you have to take out more than you spend. At a 12% effective rate, spending $4,000 a month means withdrawing about $4,545. Withdrawals before 59 and a half usually carry a 10% penalty, and required minimum distributions begin at 73.

What is the 4% rule and does it still work?

The 4% rule says you can withdraw 4% of your balance in the first year of retirement, then raise that dollar amount with inflation each year, and expect the money to last 30 years. It came from testing withdrawal rates against historical market returns, and 4% was the highest rate that survived every 30-year period tested. It remains a reasonable starting point for a 30-year retirement, but it is less safe for someone retiring at 55 who needs 40 years, and more conservative than necessary for someone retiring at 70.

How long will my savings last if I retire at 62?

Retiring at 62 stretches the same money across more years and usually means claiming Social Security early at a permanently reduced benefit, roughly 30% below the amount you would receive at 67. Both effects work against you. Set the calculator to age 62, choose 62 as your claiming age, and compare it with claiming at 67 or 70 while living on savings in between. For many people the second option lasts years longer.

How long will my money last with Social Security included?

Considerably longer, because every dollar of benefit is a dollar you do not withdraw and the money you leave invested keeps growing. A $2,000 monthly benefit typically doubles how long a $500,000 balance lasts at $4,000 a month, and below roughly $3,300 a month it removes the run-out date entirely. Tick the Social Security box in the calculator and enter the figure from your statement at ssa.gov.

Will my money run out if I live to 100?

Set the plan-to age in the advanced settings to 100 and the calculator will tell you directly, including the monthly spending figure that would make it last that long. Planning to 95 or beyond is sensible: for a healthy 65-year-old couple, there is a meaningful chance at least one partner reaches their mid-nineties.

What is a safe monthly withdrawal from my savings?

The calculator solves this for you and shows it as your safe monthly spending figure, based on your own income, growth and plan-to age. As a general benchmark, a first-year withdrawal rate of 4% or less of your starting balance has historically supported a 30-year retirement, which is about $1,667 a month from $500,000 or $3,333 a month from $1 million, on top of Social Security.