Retirement Withdrawal Calculator

A withdrawal that keeps pace with inflation (so it buys the same amount every year) only makes sense to model against a real, inflation-adjusted rate of return — not the raw nominal return your investments earn on paper. This calculator combines your expected return and inflation rate into that single real rate, then applies the same annuity-depletion math used for loan payoff timelines, just running in reverse.

Worked example: a $1,000,000 balance, $50,000 annual withdrawal (5%), 6% expected return, 3% inflation. The real return works out to about 2.91%, and because the withdrawal exceeds what that real return alone would cover, the balance is projected to last approximately 30.4 years.

This calculator assumes the same average return every single year, but real markets don't work that way — some years are up, some are down. Two retirements with the exact same long-run average return can have very different outcomes depending on when the down years happen: a market drop in the first few years of retirement, while you're also withdrawing money, does far more damage than the same drop happening later, because you're selling a shrinking balance at depressed prices instead of letting it recover untouched. This is why real retirement plans often build in more of a buffer than a simple average-return calculator like this one suggests.

Building toward this balance in the first place? Our Retirement / 401(k) Calculator projects the accumulation side of the same plan.