Pension calculator

This calculator starts from your current pension pot, adds your own monthly contribution and your employer's monthly contribution, and applies an assumed annual return, month by month, from your age today to your chosen retirement age. The projected pot at the end is the sum of three things: what you already have, everything you and your employer pay in between now and retirement, and the estimated growth on top of it.

It answers a narrower question than "will I have enough to retire": it projects the pot itself, not a retirement income. See "What this calculator doesn't include" below for what that leaves out.

Want to model a general investment plan instead of a pension? Use the investment calculator →

Money your employer pays into your pension is on top of your salary, not part of it. If you're enrolled in a workplace pension, your employer is very likely required to contribute a minimum amount alongside you, under UK auto-enrolment rules — currently a combined minimum of 8% of qualifying earnings, of which at least 3% must come from your employer. Many employers pay more than the minimum.

Because it compounds for as long as it stays invested, an employer contribution made decades before retirement can end up worth several times what was originally paid in. This calculator keeps personal and employer contributions visible as separate figures throughout, so that effect doesn't get lost inside a single combined "contributions" total.

UK pension contributions normally attract tax relief, but exactly how it's applied depends on your scheme. Under "relief at source," your provider claims basic-rate relief from HMRC and adds it to your pot automatically; higher and additional-rate taxpayers have to claim the rest themselves. Under a "net pay" arrangement, your contribution is taken from your salary before tax is calculated, so relief happens automatically at your own tax rate. Salary sacrifice works differently again, reducing your salary (and so your tax and National Insurance) rather than applying relief to a contribution directly. Which one applies to you depends on your employer's scheme, not on anything this calculator can know.

To avoid guessing which mechanism applies to you, or what tax rate you pay, this calculator simply asks for the amount that actually lands in your pension pot each month. If your scheme adds tax relief automatically, enter the contribution including that top-up. This keeps the projection accurate without needing to model your personal tax position.

A workplace or private pension pot is generally invested, usually in a default fund chosen by your provider unless you've picked your own. Like any investment, its value can go up or down, and there's no guaranteed rate of return the way there is with a savings account. The "expected annual return" you enter here is your own assumption standing in for what could be an uneven sequence of real returns over decades, not a promise or a forecast.

This calculator deliberately avoids the word "interest" for the same reason the Investment calculator does: it isn't interest a provider pays you at a set rate, it's an assumption about how invested money might grow on average.

Pension fees are usually a small annual percentage of your pot, often well under 1%, which can look negligible year to year. Over a working life of several decades, though, a fee compounds the same way growth does: money taken in charges also stops earning its own future growth, so the real cost is larger than the headline percentage suggests.

This calculator shows that difference directly. It runs the same projection twice, once with your fee and once without, and reports the gap as the "estimated impact of fees" — always a larger figure than the fees actually deducted, because it also captures the growth those deducted amounts would have gone on to earn.

Pension projections often span twenty, thirty, or forty years, which is long enough that a purely nominal figure can be misleading: prices rise over time, so a given number of pounds buys less by the time you retire than it does today. Because of that, this calculator shows the projected pot in today's money by default, alongside the nominal figure, rather than only on request.

The default inflation assumption, 2%, is the Bank of England's inflation target for UK consumer prices, a policy goal rather than a forecast of what inflation will actually average over your working life. You can turn the adjustment off or change the rate under "Adjust assumptions."

This is a pension pot projection calculator, not a full retirement planner, and it deliberately stops short of several things a complete retirement picture would need:

• State Pension. This calculator only ever projects private and workplace pension savings. It doesn't add, and can't estimate, your State Pension entitlement, which is a separate, government-paid benefit with its own eligibility rules based on National Insurance contributions.
• Tax at retirement. It doesn't model tax on withdrawals, tax-free lump sums, or any other tax treatment that applies when you actually access your pension.
• Retirement income or withdrawals. It projects the size of the pot at your chosen retirement age, not what income that pot could provide afterwards, which would depend on drawdown strategy, annuity rates, how long your retirement lasts, and more.
• Salary growth or percentage-based contributions. Contributions are entered as fixed monthly amounts. It doesn't model contributions as a percentage of a salary that itself grows over time.
• Individual scheme rules, contribution limits, or the Annual Allowance. Real pension schemes vary, and this calculator doesn't check your inputs against any specific scheme's rules or HMRC's contribution limits.

In short: this calculator answers "what could my pension pot be worth," not "will I have enough to retire." A dedicated retirement-income tool, covering drawdown and the State Pension together, would be a different calculator.

Say you're 30 with a £10,000 pension pot, contribute £200 a month yourself, your employer adds £100 a month, you assume a 5% annual return, and pay a 0.5% annual fee, until you retire at 68 — a 38-year projection.

Current pot

£10,000.00

Estimated growth

£257,136.03

Projected pension pot

£403,936.03

Your contributions

£91,200.00

Employer contributions

£45,600.00

Before fees

£460,416.90

After fees

£403,936.03

Estimated impact of fees

£56,480.86

In today's money, adjusted for 2% assumed inflation, that £403,936.03 would be worth about £190,329.48. The 0.5% annual fee is estimated to cost about £56,481 over the 38 years, most of it the growth that money would otherwise have earned rather than the fee itself.

Compare this against a general investment plan, or a more straightforward savings goal.