Best Retirement Calculators for Projecting Savings (2024)

However, generic advice doesn’t answer most people’s biggest retirement questions. You want to know how much you need to save each month, what age you can retire at, whether your investment portfolio is likely to run out, and what you can afford to do along the way.

That’s where retirement planning calculators come in. Whether you’re just starting to invest for retirement, or are planning to exit the workforce within a year or two, you can benefit from a retirement calculator.

Table of Contents

With a near-perfect score on usability, a sophisticated approach to analysis, a deep level of customization, and a free price tag (which was the tie-breaker), the T. Rowe Price Retirement Income Calculator was our top pick for the best overall retirement planning calculator. The questions it asks are detailed enough to give you a clear idea of whether you’re on track to retire, but high-level enough to get your answer in under five minutes.

The T. Rowe Price calculator uses Monte Carlo simulations to help you understand if you’re likely to meet your retirement goals or not. It also allows you to “play” with your assumptions (increasing savings rates, retiring earlier or later, adding cash infusions, etc.). This provides a dynamic retirement calculator that isn’t overly burdensome.

The calculator focuses exclusively on retirement, so you shouldn’t use it for all your financial planning needs. But if you’re wondering whether you’re on track to retire, it will help you find the answer.

Maxifi takes the prize for best total life planning tool. It integrates tax planning, life events, and changes to income and expenses into a comprehensive financial and retirement plan. It takes your current financial goals as seriously as your future retirement goals. Maxifi costs $87 per year, but it's money well spent if you use the software to make better financial decisions. If not, don’t waste your money and time digging into the tool.

A few years ago, very few companies offered comprehensive financial planning for everyday people. In this analysis, we reviewed four easy-to-use tools that give you the flexibility to consider all sorts of life events in your analysis. All five received scores that allowed them to tie for second place overall. In addition to Maxifi, ProjectionLab, New Retirement, and OnTrajectory all offer sound financial planning tools that allow you to consider retirement along with the rest of your life. We happily recommend any of these tools for personal finance aficionados who want to answer life’s biggest financial questions.

It also needed to provide details about an investor’s expected net worth at retirement and their portfolio’s expected longevity following retirement. Calculators that didn’t provide both of those details were excluded. We also excluded tools that require you to have a retirement account with the brokerage in order to use the tool.

If the calculator met these criteria, it was allowed into the list of considered tools. At that point, the most important criterion for judging these calculators was usability for the average person. This accounted for two-thirds of the overall score. A typical person should be able to jump into the calculator and get understandable results using reasonably accurate estimates of their financial situation. Any calculator that required users to wade through jargon or text-heavy pages was discounted on the usability front.

The other criterion for judging the calculator was robustness. Calculators that accounted for more investment scenarios, better refinement of assumptions, or better simulations of risk were deemed better than those with fewer options. Most calculators allow you to “play with your assumptions” to see what you can get on track for retirement. But that’s only the first part of robustness. You may also want to see how your current decision (to upgrade a house, have a child, take time off of work, etc.) is likely to affect your retirement plan. Some calculators allowed you to do this, but others didn’t.

While robustness is important, it only accounted for a third of the overall score for several reasons. First, most people don’t need incredibly detailed financial retirement calculations until the decade before they retire. Unless you’re pursuing extremely early retirement, you probably don’t need a detailed financial calculator until you’re 50-60 years old. Additionally, most people won’t use the refinement features. A few curious people may use the refinement features based on their current life goals, but most people won’t. If you’re someone who rigorously tracks your net worth or religiously uses your budgeting app, you may find it hard to believe that people don’t love spending time on financial tools. However, most people who want a robust analysis will pay a financial planner for an analysis rather than research tools themselves.