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ToolBoxGenie

Retirement Calculator

Calculators · Added 14 August 2026

This calculator runs two independent sums and compares them. One projects what your savings and contributions will grow to by your retirement date. The other works out what a corpus would actually need to be to fund the income you want, for as long as you want it, once inflation has done its work. The gap between them is the answer.

How long the money must last.

Everything already earmarked for retirement.

%

Growth phase.

%

Usually lower — a more conservative mix.

%

In today's money. Inflation is applied for you.

How to use the retirement calculator

  1. 1Enter your current age, your intended retirement age, and how many years the money must last afterwards.
  2. 2Enter what you have already saved for retirement and what you add each month.
  3. 3Set three rates: the return you expect before retirement, the lower return you expect after it, and inflation.
  4. 4Enter the monthly income you want in retirement, expressed in today's money — inflation is applied for you.
  5. 5Press Calculate. The headline is the surplus or shortfall; the panels underneath show what your corpus would actually support each month.

Examples

On track, with room to spare

Input
Age 30, retiring at 60, ₹5,00,000 saved, ₹20,000 a month, 12% before and 7% after, 6% inflation, ₹50,000 a month for 25 years
Result
Projected corpus about ₹8.86 crore against about ₹7.68 crore required — a surplus of roughly ₹1.18 crore

Note the required figure: ₹50,000 a month today becomes about ₹2,87,000 a month at 60 after thirty years of 6% inflation.

The same plan started ten years later

Input
Identical figures but starting at age 40
Result
A large shortfall — the corpus has twenty years to grow instead of thirty

The contributions are the same. The missing decade is doing all the damage, and no realistic increase in contribution fully replaces it.

What one point of inflation costs

Input
The first example with inflation at 7% instead of 6%
Result
The required corpus rises sharply while the projection does not move

Inflation is the assumption this calculation is most sensitive to. Run it at several rates.

About the retirement calculator

The number that surprises everyone

Most people can estimate what they spend in a month. Almost nobody has an intuition for what that becomes after thirty years of inflation, or for the size of the pot required to sustain it for another twenty-five. The two effects multiply, and the result is routinely several times larger than the guess people arrive at unaided.

The mechanism is worth stating plainly. At 6% inflation, prices roughly double every twelve years. Over a thirty-year working life that is nearly three doublings — a factor of about 5.7. A lifestyle costing ₹50,000 a month today needs close to ₹2,87,000 a month at retirement to feel identical, and that is before considering that healthcare, which becomes a larger share of spending with age, has historically inflated faster than the headline rate.

This is why the required-corpus figure on this page is deliberately computed from your desired lifestyle rather than from a rule of thumb like 'twenty times your final salary'. Those rules embed assumptions about inflation and longevity that may not match yours, and they hide exactly the sensitivity that matters.

Which levers actually move the answer

Run the calculator a few times and a hierarchy emerges. Time is the most powerful input by a wide margin: starting ten years earlier does more than any plausible increase in contribution, because the early money compounds through every subsequent year. This is unhelpful advice for anyone already past that point and the most valuable advice available to anyone who is not.

After time, the two rates matter most, and they matter asymmetrically. The pre-retirement return moves the projection; the inflation assumption moves the requirement. Because they act on different halves of the calculation, being wrong about inflation is not offset by being right about returns — a plan built on 5% inflation that meets 7% is short on both sides at once.

Contribution is the lever you control most directly and the one with the least leverage per rupee, which is a frustrating combination. Its real power is in growth: increasing the monthly amount each year in line with income, rather than holding it flat as this projection assumes, closes gaps that a fixed contribution cannot. If the result here shows a shortfall, a rising contribution is usually a more realistic fix than a heroic constant one.

Frequently asked questions

Why is the required corpus so much larger than I expected?
Two compounding effects. First, the income you want has to be inflated to your retirement date — at 6% over thirty years, prices multiply by about 5.7, so ₹50,000 a month today is nearly ₹2,87,000 a month then. Second, that inflated amount has to be sustainable for the whole of retirement, during which prices keep rising. Most people underestimate both.
Why are there two different return rates?
Because the portfolios are different. Before retirement you can hold volatile growth assets, because you have time to recover from a bad decade. After retirement you are selling assets to live on, so a bad decade is realised as losses — which usually means a more conservative mix and a lower expected return. Using one rate for both phases flatters the result.
How does the required corpus account for inflation during retirement?
It discounts the withdrawals at a real return — the post-retirement return net of inflation — rather than the nominal one. That reflects the fact that a pot being drawn down still earns while prices keep rising. Using the nominal return instead is the single most common way these calculators understate what is needed, sometimes by a wide margin.
Does this account for EPF, NPS or a pension?
Only if you include them. Add existing EPF and NPS balances to current savings, and your monthly contributions to the monthly figure. A defined-benefit pension is different in kind — it reduces the income your corpus needs to produce, so subtract it from the desired monthly income rather than adding anything to the corpus.
Is this financial advice?
No. It is arithmetic on assumptions you supply, and every one of those assumptions is uncertain. It is useful for seeing how sensitive the answer is to each input — which is the point — and not for deciding what to invest in. A qualified adviser who knows your full position is a different and complementary thing.

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