Retirement planning: a walkthrough
A suggested order for exploring your retirement picture using the calculators on this site — not a plan for what your numbers should be, just a sensible route through the tools.
Retirement income in the UK usually comes from more than one place — maybe a workplace pension, maybe a SIPP, maybe a final salary scheme, almost certainly the State Pension. This site models each of those separately because they each work quite differently, then brings them together in one place so you can see the combined picture.
The order below is just a sensible way to move through the tools — you don't have to follow it, and skipping anything that doesn't apply to you (most people won't have a final salary pension, for instance) is completely normal. Nothing here is a recommendation for what to enter or what to do with the results — see our Terms & Conditions for why.
Start with your basic details
Your current age, target retirement age, and salary all live in one place, because every pension calculator on the site reads them from here rather than asking you to repeat yourself. This is worth doing first — everything downstream depends on it.
Add your workplace pension, if you have one
Enter your current pot value and contribution rates, and it projects forward to your retirement age. If you're curious whether you could reduce or stop contributions at some point before retiring and still hit a target income, there's an optional feature for exploring that too — entirely your call whether to use it.
Have a final salary pension? Add that too
If you're in (or have been in) a defined benefit scheme — NHS, Local Government, Teachers, Civil Service, and similar all work this way — this one's different from the others, since the income it pays is based on a formula rather than an investment pot. Scheme presets fill in typical rules if yours matches one of the common ones.
Add a SIPP, if you're contributing to one
Self-Invested Personal Pensions get tax relief added automatically, and this calculator models that alongside your own contributions and projected growth — separately from your workplace pension, since they're distinct pots with their own rules.
Check your State Pension
Based on your National Insurance qualifying years rather than anything you've saved — enter how many years you've built up, and it projects the rest based on your remaining working years. Worth doing regardless of what other pensions you have, since almost everyone's entitled to some State Pension.
See it all together
Once you've filled in whichever of the above apply to you, the Financial Summary combines them into one household view — total projected retirement income from all sources, a year-by-year net worth projection, and a comparison against the PLSA's published Minimum/Moderate/Comfortable retirement living standards, purely as a reference point rather than a target we're suggesting.
It only reflects whichever calculators you've actually visited — anything you haven't gotten to yet just won't show up until you do.
Every calculator above uses the same shared growth, inflation and interest rate assumptions from UK Rates. Change the scenario there, or override any individual rate, and it applies across all of them at once — useful if you want to see how a more cautious or optimistic set of assumptions changes the combined picture.
This page describes a way to move through the tools, not a recommendation for what your numbers should be or what you should do with the results. See our Terms & Conditions for the full detail, or our overview of every calculator if you'd rather browse them all at once instead of following a set order.