Retirement Calculator

Online calculators are excellent tools for helping people with their personal finances. They make it possible to turn complicated matters of income and borrowing into manageable and easily understandable forms. Our UK retirement calculator will help you plan for your retirement by telling you what you can expect to draw as a pension based upon how much you invest over your working life.

People are living much longer today than their grandparents did and retirement is a whole new phase of life. Everyone wants to know how much money they will need to enjoy that phase and whether their current arrangements will deliver it. The use of a retirement calculator in the UK has become very popular because, by answering a few simple questions, in just a couple of minutes you can get a forecast of your likely pension based on your current circumstances. This takes into account any plans you’re part of, including defined benefit and defined contribution schemes as well as the state pension. It will also suggest a target for your retirement income based on your salary level.

Apart from basic personal details such as your age, the calculator will ask for the current value of your pension, which you can get your pension provider to tell you. You’ll also need to know how much you and your employer, either as a percentage or as a figure, contributes to your pension. The calculator always uses the current HMRC personal allowance and tax bands to ensure the most accurate estimate possible.

After feeding all this information into the calculator, the crucial final question is when you plan to retire. If you don’t like the look of your first retirement calculator pension estimate then you can simply change the information you enter until you arrive at an acceptable result. This will show you what you need to do to reach that target income.

You can change your chosen retirement age until the figures work. If you don’t want to do this then you can adjust the contribution figures instead until they reach a level that returns the right number.

Private sector pension plans have become highly sophisticated over the years. Some are frozen if you move jobs, others are portable, so it’s important to understand the implications of every career move you make.

If you’re thinking of taking early retirement then it’s even more important to check what your income might be when you stop working. That’s when it’s particularly helpful to set the main focus of our retirement calculator by age because it allows you to try out as many different retirement age options as you like and get an instant guide figure.

If you work in the public sector and plan to stay there for life, then you probably have simpler pension arrangements than a private sector employee. However, retiring early will have an impact here too. If you work in the health service, for example, you should use an NHS pension early retirement calculator. Similarly, if you are part of a local government pension scheme, an LGPS early retirement calculator will help you adjust your planning so you will have sufficient income in the future.

We always recommend you seek expert advice but using our pension retirement calculator in advance will help you get the best out of that advice. It’s not only your own circumstances that can change, so it always pays to keep an eye on your investment for the future.

The sooner you check your situation, the earlier you can make the necessary changes to your contributions. This means if you do need to put in more, you will have longer to do it and can spread the cost. If you assume your pension plan is adequate and it turns out to be insufficient when retirement is almost upon you, there is very little you can do to make up the shortfall.

Planning for retirement is a positive thing. After decades of work, your retirement is your own time. Whether you want relaxation, adventure or a mixture of both, make sure you have the money to do whatever you wish. Make use of our retirement calculator without delay.