Retirement Corpus Calculator

How much do you actually need to retire?

Almost every conversation about retirement in India starts with a round number — a crore, two crore, five crore. Round numbers are a bad way to plan, because the figure that matters is not a target someone else picked. It is whatever amount of capital can pay your bills, adjusted upwards every year for the rest of your life, after you stop earning.

That reduces to four questions, and the calculator above answers all four at once:

• What will your life cost then? Today's expenses, inflated to your retirement date.
• For how long? From the year you retire to the age you plan to live to.
• What will the money earn while you spend it? Your post-retirement return assumption.
• How much are you on track to have? Existing savings plus everything you still plan to invest.

Why inflation does most of the damage

The single most under-appreciated number in retirement planning is the gap between today's expenses and retirement-date expenses. At 6% inflation, prices roughly double every twelve years. Someone 25 years from retirement is planning for a world where their ₹60,000 monthly budget costs about ₹2.57 lakh — and that is the starting figure, on day one of a retirement that might run another 25 years.

This is why the corpus number surprises people. You are not funding today's lifestyle. You are funding a lifestyle priced two or three decades from now, for two or three decades after that. Our inflation calculator lets you break your budget down line by line, which matters because healthcare — the one category that grows as you age — has historically inflated faster than the headline basket.

How this calculator works out the corpus

Rather than applying a rule of thumb such as 25× or 30× expenses, the calculator solves the problem directly. It takes your inflated first-year expense, runs a month-by-month withdrawal simulation for every year of your retirement, increases the withdrawal each year by your inflation assumption, credits the remaining balance with your post-retirement return, and searches for the opening balance that leaves exactly zero (or your chosen legacy amount) in the final month.

That simulation is the same code that powers our SWP calculator. It is built this way deliberately: the corpus figure here and the "how long will it last" figure there can never contradict each other, because they are two views of one calculation. The full set of conventions is written up on the calculator methodology page.

The number is only as good as the assumptions

A retirement projection is not a forecast. It is a statement of what happens if returns and inflation behave exactly as you typed them in, every single year, for fifty years. They will not. Markets deliver their average through violent swings around it, and the order those swings arrive in matters enormously once you are withdrawing.

That is why the scenario table above moves both return assumptions down two percentage points and inflation up one, and shows you the result. If the conservative row is uncomfortable but survivable, the plan has slack. If it is catastrophic, the plan depends on being right about the future, which is a fragile place to stand.

What to do with the gap

If the calculator shows a shortfall, there are only five levers, and it is worth understanding which are actually within your control:

• Invest more each month. The most reliable lever, and the one the "SIP needed" figure quantifies.
• Increase your investment every year. Turn on the step-up input — a 10% annual increase usually does more work than two extra percentage points of return.
• Retire later. Brutal but powerful: it adds earning years and removes spending years simultaneously.
• Spend less in retirement. Lowering the expense input scales the entire corpus requirement down proportionally.
• Earn a higher return. Listed last because it is the only one you do not control.