Welcome to Calculate My Pension

The Pension Planning Website

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Whatever stage of the pension planning journey you are at, you have found the right place to gain clarity over your current situation and how to improve it.

Tick the box that applies to you:

You can get started right away by clicking the button below, or scroll down for more information.

What You'll Learn About Your Pension

Sustainable Retirement Income
Discover how much income you can afford to take in retirement without funds running out, given your current savings and ongoing contributions.
Fund Progression
Observe the future progression of your funds in a chart, growing up to retirement and then declining as you start taking income, targeted to reach zero by the age of your choice.
Retirement Income Breakdown
Analyse the breakdown of your retirement income between different sources in each retirement year, including your state pension, with different sources commencing payment at different ages.
The Effect of Retirement Age and Contributions
You can easily change your inputs and see the results update instantaneously. See what your pension would be if you retired early, or how much more pension you could afford if you increased your monthly contributions.
The Effect of Assumptions and Scenarios
See how your results change under the three standard growth scenarios and three levels of charges. Premium members have full control to alter the assumptions and can also model a market crash.
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Assessing Retirement Income Needs

Calculating what income you can afford in retirement is just one half of the retirement planning equation. The other half is understanding how much income you’ll need to support your desired lifestyle.

We use the widely recognised Retirement Living Standards to help you estimate your personal income needs. These specify three standards of living: Minimum, Moderate, and Comfortable with income requirements for each that reflect real-world costs based on independent research.

Included in the free version, the Budget Calculator allows you to tailor your retirement income needs in line with your own circumstances or preferences, using the same expense categories that were used in the research for the Retirement Living Standards. You can select a Minimum, Moderate or Comfortable standard for each category of spending — or specify an exact figure using the sliders.

This provides a quick and easy way to allow for your own personal circumstances and preferences without already having a budget, while still using the Retirement Living Standards as a foundation. This tailored income target feeds directly into a comparison with your calculated affordable income, allowing you to see if you are on target and to adjust your plans accordingly.

Planning As A Couple

Thinking as a household rather than two separate savers often unlocks better decisions. Your pensions may be different sizes, taxed differently, and may start paying out at different ages (for instance, State Pensions commencing in different years). Modelling everything together allows an affordable combined retirement income to be calculated.

This is what our premium Plan As A Couple feature provides. It projects your partner’s pensions, savings and other retirement benefits alongside your own and calculates an affordable combined retirement income for the two of you.

To put that figure in context it is compared with the couple‑level Minimum, Moderate and Comfortable benchmarks published by the Retirement Living Standards. Their couple budgets build in the economies of sharing while recognising two people still need more than one, giving you a robust yardstick for joint planning.

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AI Models
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Ask The AI

Whilst artificial intelligence has been increasingly used as a convenient tool for gathering information about financial planning over the past few years, concerns around the risk of “hallucinations” (AI confidently providing incorrect or outdated answers) meant it could not be relied upon to provide correct answers.

However, 2025 has seen the advent of reasoning models which are less prone to hallucinations because they break problems into logical steps, allowing for more accurate and consistent answers based on internal coherence rather pattern-matching alone.

To go a step further to improve confidence in the answers, we use three models in collaboration to check for possible hallucinations.

  1. First, GPT4.1 and Claude Sonnet 4.0 independently provide an answer to your question.
  2. Then, Gemini 2.0 Flash compares the two answers to identify any discrepancies that might have resulted from a hallucination.
  3. If there are any disagreements, Gemini will use a Google search to determine which answer is correct, along with checking that any rates, bands or allowances mentioned are up to date.

A full subscription to all three of these premium models would cost you around £50 per month. However, restricting focus to retirement planning alone allows this feature to be included in our premium subscription of just £49.99 per year.

Free Features

Here is a list of the free features, providing a valuable tool to all users.

Discover the level of income that you can afford throughout your retirement, based on your target retirement age, your current pension fund and future contributions. The calculation takes into account your pensions, ISAs and other income, as well as your state pension entitlement.

Easily compare your projected affordable income with 3 standards of living in retirement based on research presented in the Retirement Living Standards website. You will see whether you are on track for a surplus in retirement or facing a shortfall.

Tailor your retirement income needs in line with your own circumstances or preferences, using the same categories as the Retirement Living Standards website. You can select a Minimum, Moderate or Comfortable standard for each category of spending — or specify an exact figure using the sliders.

See how your affordable retirement income varies under the three investment growth scenarios prescribed by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA): Low, Intermediate and High. These scenarios match the assumptions used in the pension projections you receive in your annual statements.

Choose to reduce the percentage of your salary going into your pension and instead receive that amount as additional net pay to be added to your ISA. Instantly see how this choice affects your retirement income and the value of tax relief you are giving up in return for more flexibility.

Explore the impact of retiring earlier or later on your affordable retirement income and how it affects your surplus or deficit.

Change how long you want your income to last. You could project income up to average life expectancy, or to an older age (e.g. 95) for a more cautious approach.

View a colour-coded bar chart of your income in retirement split by source (pensions, ISAs, state pension, etc.) for each year of retirement.

View a chart illustrating how your pension fund and ISA grow before retirement and the profile of drawdown during retirement, up to your selected end-of-projection age.

Understand the effect of charges on your fund over time, both before and after retirement, using a dedicated charges chart.

Choose whether you want your results shown in today's money, removing the effect of inflation, or in projected future terms. This can help you to better understand what your retirement income will really be worth.

Toggle between viewing your income and needs as monthly or annual figures for easier planning and comparison.

See the actual figures behind the charts set out in tables.

For your pension fund and ISA, see the opening and closing balances for each year and a breakdown of all the items that make up the movement.

For your retirement income, see the gross and net values of each source of income.

See a calculation of the average life expectancy for someone of your current age and sex to help plan how long your retirement income needs to last.

Explore concise answers to the most frequently asked questions about retirement planning, grouped neatly by category. This is a great starting point for beginners looking to understand pensions and how retirement works.

Even if you're not sure what questions to ask yet, the FAQs page can guide you to the key topics and help you build your knowledge with confidence.

Tax Calculator: See the effect of different income levels on your tax and national insurance.

Salary Sacrifice Calculator: See the effect of salary sacrifice on your take home pay and pension contributions.

More calculators will be added in the future.
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Premium Features

Below is a full list of premium features currently available. The premium subscription is currently priced at £49.99 annually. As we continuously develop and introduce new premium features in the coming months, the subscription price will increase, but existing annual subscribers will continue to enjoy all updates at their originally-locked rate.

Ask complex pension and retirement planning questions with greater confidence. Our advanced AI solution combines answers from GPT4.1 and Claude Sonnet 4.0, cross-checking them using Gemini 2.0 Flash and real-time Google searches to ensure accuracy and up-to-date information, significantly reducing the risk of incorrect answers.

This feature projects your partner's pension (and other retirement provision) alongside your own, calculating an affordable combined retirement income, based on the assumption that you and your partner retire at the same time.

It also provides the recommended combined income levels for a couple for the Minimum, Moderate and Comfortable standards of living from the Retirement Living Standards website and compares this with your affordable combined income.

Fine-tuning assumptions for fund growth, inflation, and charges allows you to see how your retirement plan holds up under different conditions:

  • Fund Growth: Your future income depends heavily on how your investments perform. Adjusting this helps you explore best-case, worst-case, and average scenarios — giving you a more realistic picture of potential outcomes.

  • Inflation: After a long period of low inflation, the 2020s have seen inflation shocks that could not have been predicted. Entering higher inflation values will allow you to test how significantly future inflation affects your affordable retirement income. You will be surprised how devastating sustained higher inflation rates can be to your affordable income.

  • Fund Charges: Even small fees can have a big impact over decades. Adjusting fund charges helps you understand how much of your income might be lost to fees — and whether switching to lower-cost investments could improve your results.

A crash in the stock market just before or just after retirement can have a devastating effect on your pension fund and what you can afford to take as income. The premium version allows you to model the effect of a fall in your fund values of a specified percent at a specified age.

From that you can work out how many more years you would need to work to recover from a crash, or how much less income you would be able to afford.

This feature allows you to vary the mix of income between pension and ISA, to find the optimum mix to minimise the amount of tax you pay over the long term.

The free version automatically uses pension income up to the personal allowance to maximise tax-free income. But this feature allows you to fill a specified proportion of the basic rate band (lower rate bands in Scotland) with pension income and take the rest from your ISA, as long as you have ISA funds remaining.

You can easily see the overall effect on the tax you pay over your whole retirement with the Total Future Tax Rate figure in provided with the Key Metrics feature.

This features allows you to convert a specified proportion of your pension fund to an annuity at a specified age, seeing the amount of income you would give up for the certainty of a guaranteed income for life. You can calibrate the annuity rate calculations to market rates for your own specific circumstances using the Annuity Rate Calibration Tool.

Three key metrics are calculated which you can view on the dashboard:

  • Initial Income Yield: This tells you how effectively your savings are being converted into income at the start of retirement. You can compare this figure to the 4% rule , a widely used rule of thumb for sustainable withdrawals.

  • Total Future Tax Rate: This shows how much tax you will pay as a percentage of your retirement income over your whole retirement. It’s useful for planning the most tax-efficient mix of withdrawal between pensions and ISAs. This is particularly true when planning as a couple as you can easily see who is paying the highest tax rate.

  • Total Fund Charges Rate: This gives the total amount you will pay in fund charges as a percentage of your retirement income over your whole retirement. This can be surprisingly high and will demonstrate the value of lower-cost options, significantly improving your long-term income.

If you are still paying off a mortgage or have children at home, your retirement planning may include an increase in pension contributions at a certain age. Specify the age at which you plan to increase your contributions and the amount of the increase. You can do this for you pension and your ISA.

If the results tell you that your affordable retirement income is less than you need, this feature provides another way you can increase your initial income.

By setting income reductions in the later years of your retirement, you can see how this frees up funds to allow a higher income in the early years.

You will be able to specify two percentage drops in income at specified ages. Your affordable income is automatically recalculated to see the effect.

If you have a defined benefit pension that allows early retirement, the premium version allows you to investigate retiring early at different ages.

It will allow you to input the early retirement factors specific to your scheme. You can then see the effect of taking a reduced income at different ages and how that affects your overall retirement income level as well as its tax efficiency.

Purchasing an annuity provides you with a guaranteed income for life and reduced sensitivity to market fluctuations. But it may also give you a higher affordable income than drawdown! Find out with the annuity purchase feature. This allows you to specify:

Annuity Purchase Age
Percentage of Fund to Convert

The model assumes that the tax free cash for that portion of your fund is taken and moved into your ISA as soon as you allowances permit.

You can calibrate the annuity rate calculator to current market rates using the Annuity Rate Calibration Tool.

Access to three additional charts relating to tax payments:

  • Tax By Tax Band: See the breakdown of your tax payments in each retirement year split by tax band. This makes it easy to see how you might adjust your plans to reduce overall tax payments.

  • Tax By Source: See how tax is calculated on each source of your income.

  • Tax Free Allowance: See the cumulative tax free allowance as up to 25% of your pension income is tax free but only up to a lifetime maximum of £268,275. When this limit is reached you will see a significant increase in tax, so it is worth considering adjustments to your drawdown plan to avoid this.

Premium members can log in at a later date and resume their investigation with the same inputs from where they left off. There is a button to clear all inputs and start again if required. The inputs are stored securely and are not shared with any third parties.

Future Premium Features

These are some of the features planned for rolling out over the coming months. If you have a feature in mind that you would like to suggest, please get in touch at calculatemypension@gmail.com.

A built-in AI assistant on the dashboard page that can help you understand your results, answer questions and suggest scenarios to try.

Currently, planning as a couple is done by separately modelling each person and then combining the affordable incomes to compare with a couple's income needs. There is no interaction between the simulations. An interactive simulation would allow:

  • You and your partner's limits and allowances to be considered together, for example using both ISA allowances to invest funds from a tax-free lump sum.
  • Modelling the case where your partner would be retiring before their earliest retirement age, but with insufficient ISA funds to cover the gap. You could take a higher income for the first few years to cover the gap, but then have a lower income for the rest of your retirement.

Enabling separate modelling of cash ISAs and stocks and shares ISAs is more realistic, but also allows the crash-resilient drawdown strategy in the next feature.

Holding a cash buffer can reduce the impact of a market crash. Here's how this strategy would work:

  • Specify the size of a cash buffer in terms of the number of months of future income to be held in cash.
  • Divestment of funds into cash would be modelled to keep the same number of months income available in cash.
  • Divestment would be paused automatically under a market crash scenario and resumed when the cash is used up. By that time the market will have recovered some of the losses.

This allows you to see the reduction in income resulting from a higher level of cash, but also the reduced impact on income in the event of a market crash.

Model possible scenarios of changes to government policy such as extended freezes to income tax bands or a reduction in the tax-free lump sum limit.

Currently it is assumed that any tax-free lump sum taken is spent immediately. This feature would allow the lump sum to be gradually transferred into your ISA, allowing for annual contribution limits over time.

A lower growth rate would apply to the funds sitting outside the ISA to reflect the tax payable until such time that all the funds can be transferred into the ISA.

A tool to help you understand how the transfer value of your defined benefit pension is calculated, to help you decide whether it is value for money.

Find out whether it’s worth paying voluntary contributions to boost your State Pension.

Download a customised PDF of your results under selected scenarios, including charts, tables and assumptions, ready to print or share.
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