Almost every calculator on this site wants the same six figures. Gather them once and the rest of the site takes minutes rather than hours. Approximate is fine — you're comparing options, not filing anything, and none of these need to be right to the dollar.
Enter these once and they follow you around the site. Every calculator runs entirely in your browser and nothing is uploaded or sent anywhere. The figures below are carried from one calculator to the next so you don't retype them — for this visit only, unless you use the Your figures control in the top bar to be remembered next time, or to switch it off. You can safely use your real numbers, and the answers are considerably more useful if you do.
1
What you have invested
The pot the calculators draw down. What you're after is the total of everything you could actually turn into spending money over your retirement — not your net worth, and not everything you own.
Counts
Workplace and personal pensions
Investment accounts, funds, shares
Tax-free savings accounts
Cash savings beyond your emergency fund
Pots you can't reach yet but will be able to — note the date
Doesn't count
The house you live in, unless you'd genuinely sell or downsize
Your emergency cash — that's a separate job
A pension that pays an income rather than holding a balance (that's number 3)
Money you've already promised to someone else
On the house. This is the most common disagreement people have with retirement calculators, so it's worth being clear. Your home is real wealth, but it doesn't pay the electricity bill. Include it only if there's a specific, likely plan to release some of it — downsizing to a cheaper place, or equity release. If it's "we'd sell if we absolutely had to", leave it out and treat it as your last line of defence rather than part of the plan. The liquidity risk calculator is about exactly this distinction.
On a partner. If you're planning as a household, add both sides together and use household spending in number 2. Just don't mix them — one person's savings against two people's spending is the most common way to frighten yourself unnecessarily.
If you don't know: log in to each provider and write down the balance. It's usually four or five accounts, and it takes about twenty minutes. This is the one number worth getting properly rather than estimating, because everything else is measured against it.
2
What you spend in a year
The single most important figure on this list, and the one people are least sure about. It matters more than your return assumption, more than your retirement date, and considerably more than which funds you hold — because it's the number every projection is divided by.
What you want is total annual outgoings: everything that leaves the account, including the irregular things. Not a budget of what you think you ought to spend. What you actually spend.
Three ways to get there, in order of accuracy:
Twelve months of bank statements. Total everything that went out, then subtract transfers between your own accounts and anything you were saving or investing. Most banks will export a year to a spreadsheet in two clicks. This is the honest answer and usually a slightly uncomfortable one.
Income minus savings. Take your annual take-home pay and subtract what actually ended up saved or invested over the year. Whatever's left, you spent. Quick, and surprisingly accurate.
Three months, scaled up. Total the last three months, multiply by four, then add 15% for the lumpy things three months won't have caught — insurance renewals, the car, Christmas, a holiday, the boiler.
Then adjust for retirement. Some costs go (commuting, work clothes, pension contributions, possibly the mortgage). Others arrive (more heating during the day, more travel early on, more health spending later). The common finding is that the first decade costs more than the last year of work, not less, because you've suddenly got time to spend money in. The spending ramp calculator models that shape properly.
If you don't know: use 75% of your current take-home pay as a placeholder and get on with it. It's the conventional rule of thumb and it's good enough to start. But come back and do it properly — a 20% error here swamps every other assumption on the site.
3
Income that arrives regardless of markets
Money that turns up whatever shares are doing. This is the floor under your retirement, and the size of it changes almost every answer on this site — because you only need to fund the gap between it and your spending.
State pension or social security — the amount, and crucially the age it starts. Most governments have a forecast service that gives you your own figure rather than the maximum.
Final-salary or defined-benefit pensions — an annual amount, and whether it rises with inflation.
Rental income, after costs and voids, if it's dependable.
Part-time work, if you're planning on it — though be honest about how long you'd want to, and whether you'd be able to.
Note the start dates as well as the amounts. If you stop at 62 and nothing starts until 67, those five bridge years are the heaviest withdrawals you'll ever make, landing at the worst possible moment for sequence risk. That gap deserves its own attention.
If you don't know: get your state pension forecast first — it's free, takes minutes, and people are wrong about it in both directions surprisingly often. The country page for the US, the UK, Australia or Canada tells you exactly where to get yours.
4
The mortgage, if there is one
Four figures, all on your latest statement: the balance, the interest rate, the years left, and the monthly repayment.
One more that matters more than people expect: is the rate fixed, and until when? A fixed rate ending in three years is a different situation from one running to the end of the term, because it means you have a known date on which your repayment might jump. If it's variable, note today's rate and be ready to test a couple of percentage points higher.
Also worth writing down: any other debt. Cards, car finance, a personal loan. They rarely change the big picture but they're often the first thing worth clearing, and the debt sustainability calculator wants the total.
If you don't know: the balance and rate are on the last statement or in the app. Don't guess the rate — a percentage point either way genuinely changes the pay-off-or-invest answer, which is the whole point of that calculator.
5
Your age, and the age to plan to
Your current age is easy. The second one is a decision, and it's worth taking seriously, because it sets how long the money has to stretch.
The instinct is to use life expectancy. Don't — it's an average, and roughly half of people beat it. Planning to your life expectancy is planning for a coin-flip chance of running out while you're still here to notice.
There's a second wrinkle. The life expectancy figure quoted in the news is measured from birth and dragged down by deaths at every age along the way. Having already reached your sixties, your expected age at death is meaningfully higher than that headline number, and higher again if you're a woman, a non-smoker, or reasonably well off — all three of which shift it by years rather than months.
The practical answer: plan to 95, or 100 if longevity runs in your family. If your plan survives that, it survives most things. If planning to 95 breaks the plan, you've learned something important, and it's much better to learn it now than at 88.
If you don't know: use 95. The longevity calculator handles this properly by running a survival curve rather than a single age, so you can see the odds at every age instead of picking one.
6
How bad a year you could actually sit through
Not a personality quiz. A practical question with a financial answer, and the one input where being honest with yourself is worth more than being accurate.
The question is: if you opened your statement and the balance had fallen by a third, what would you actually do? Not what you'd like to think you'd do. What you'd do.
If the honest answer is "sell something, I couldn't stand it" — that's not a character flaw, it's information, and it means you're holding more risk than you can carry. A plan you abandon at the bottom is worse than a more cautious plan you stick with.
If it's "leave it alone, that's what it does" — you have more room than most people, and being too cautious carries its own cost over thirty years.
If it's "I'd need to know I could still pay the bills for two years" — that's the correct answer, and it's a cash buffer question rather than an allocation one. This calculator sizes it.
Two separate things are hiding in that question, and the site treats them separately: what your plan can survive financially (risk capacity) and what you can survive personally. The smaller of the two is the one that governs.
If you don't know: think back to 2020 or 2008 and what you actually did, not what you remember intending to do. Past behaviour is the best available guide, and it's usually a more sobering one than a questionnaire.
Your six numbers
Print this, fill it in, keep it with your papers. Everything on this site runs off these.
1. Total investedPensions, investments, savings beyond the emergency fund. Not the house.
2. Annual spendingWhat actually leaves the account in a year, including the lumpy things.
3b. Age it startsAnd the size of the gap between stopping work and that date.
4. Mortgage balancePlus rate, years remaining and monthly repayment.
4b. Rate / years left / repaymentNote whether the rate is fixed, and until when.
4c. Other debtCards, car finance, personal loans — total.
5. Your age now
5b. Age you're planning to95 unless you have a reason to use something else.
6. The fall you could sit throughHonestly. As a percentage, or in words.
Cash buffer you hold todayMonths of spending available without selling anything.
Date completedWorth redoing once a year.
Two things worth knowing before you enter any of it
Both cause more wrong answers than any arithmetic error.
Use today's money throughout, or future money throughout — never both
If you enter what you spend today, then the return figure you use should be a real one, with inflation already taken out — around 4–5% a year for a share-heavy portfolio rather than 7%. If you'd rather use the headline 7%, then your spending needs to grow with inflation each year, which is what most of the calculators here do for you automatically.
Mixing the two is the most common mistake people make with any retirement calculator, and it flatters the plan badly — it's worth roughly a decade of extra security that isn't there. Each calculator states which convention it uses; how to read the results works through an example.
Round numbers are fine — precision is not the point
There's a temptation to get everything exact before starting. Resist it. A projection thirty years out has an honest error bar measured in hundreds of thousands, so the difference between $612,400 and $600,000 is noise. Enter the round number and start.
What actually rewards precision is your spending, because everything is measured against it, and your mortgage rate, because the pay-off decision genuinely turns on it. The rest can be approximate.
Enter them on the first calculator you open and the rest of the site will already know them. If you would rather it didn't, the Your figures control in the top bar turns the carry-over off; the about page sets out exactly what is and isn't kept.
Got your numbers? Start here works out which calculators are worth your time. If a term stops you, the plain-English list has all of them.
General information only — not financial, tax, legal or investment advice. The guidance above is about gathering your own figures, not about what to do with them. Nothing you type into this site is stored or transmitted; everything runs in your browser.