Am I on track to retire?
Build your retirement plan and see how it holds up in every market in history.
Try it with a sample plan. No account needed for the demo.
Three minutes to a first answer
It starts with your paycheck
Retire Plan opens with a short interview in five parts: you, your income, your savings, your spending and the answer. Give it your age, your state and your pay. It works out your federal tax, your payroll tax and your state tax from the 2026 tables, so you never have to guess at a tax rate. Your take-home shows under your pay as you type, and the bar at the top shows the age you could retire at so far. At the end you get that age and its success rate: the share of historical cases where a plan like yours never ran out.
With a partner, each of you gets your own pay step with your own contribution limits, and the two are combined into one household.
Tick what applies to you: a rental property, a military or federal job, a pension, semi-retirement, other income. Only those questions come up.
You can go back to any step, and nothing is locked. Later, Change my answers in the plan menu opens the interview again.
Semi-retirement
Plan a semi-retirement
Work part-time for a few years before you retire completely. Pick the age you want to semi-retire, and Retire Plan works out how much the part-time work needs to pay, and for how long.
The Coast FIRE and Barista FIRE buttons fill in the pay for you.
Health insurance before 65 is not included. Part-time jobs often come without it, so find out what it would cost you before you count on it.
Backtest
Every case since 1871
Your plan is run once for a person who started it in 1871, again for 1872, and so on through the last window the data allows. Each case uses the returns and inflation of those years as they happened: the 1929 crash, the 1970s inflation, the 1966 retiree who watched a flat market eat a portfolio that looked comfortable on paper.
The headline is the share of those cases that never ran out of money. Below it you can see which ones failed and at what age, and switch the chart between individual paths and a heat map of where most outcomes landed.
The full plan
Change one input and watch everything move
Salary, contributions, employer match, the split between stocks and bonds, the age you claim Social Security, a pension, a taxable brokerage account. Every input recomputes the backtest and a thousand Monte Carlo runs in well under a second, so trying an idea costs nothing.
Taxes and IRS rules
Contribution limits, penalties and required withdrawals
Contribution limits for 2026, with the catch-ups at 50 and at 60. The 10 percent penalty on money drawn before 59 and a half, and the rule of 55 that waives it on a 401K. Required minimum distributions from 73 or 75, using the IRS table, with the part you do not spend saved rather than counted as income you can spend.
State income tax uses each state’s own brackets and rules, including which states leave Social Security alone and which exempt retirement withdrawals. Each rule has a switch, so you can see what it costs you.
Where the numbers come from
You can check every input to the model
Here is every source the model uses, how it was checked, and what it leaves out. See how accurate Retire Plan is, with the sums done by hand next to its answers.
| Stock returns | Robert Shiller’s monthly S&P composite series with dividends, 1871 to 2026, compounded month by month into calendar years. |
|---|---|
| Bond returns | Worked out from the yield curve. A 10-year Treasury is bought at January’s yield and sold a year later as a 9-year bond at the next January’s yield. Many calculators use the yield itself, which understates 1982 by about 15 points. |
| Inflation | Each backtest window uses the CPI recorded for those years, rather than one assumed rate. |
| Tax tables | 2026 federal brackets and deductions, the IRS worksheet for taxing Social Security, the 0, 15 and 20 percent bands for capital gains, Social Security and Medicare tax with the $184,500 wage base, and each state’s own brackets and retirement rules. |
| Outside checks | Retire Plan matches 45 of 55 official IRS, Social Security and state worked examples exactly, and none of the other 10 is a mistake in Retire Plan. Federal tax matches the PolicyEngine tax calculator to the dollar in 121 of 122 households. See every check and the sums done by hand. |
| Cross-check | Stock and bond series correlate 0.97 and 0.96 with Aswath Damodaran’s independent annual series over 1928 to 2025. |
| Against the literature | On the Trinity study’s own 41 cases, a 4 percent withdrawal over 30 years at 75/25 lasts in 97.6 percent of them in Retire Plan, and the study reports 98 percent. The one case that ran out started in 1966. |
| Not modeled | Health insurance and other healthcare costs before Medicare, including during semi-retirement, Medicare premiums, long-term care, the years after a spouse dies, Roth conversions, the alternative minimum tax, and city income taxes. |
How accurate is Retire Plan? Retire Plan is checked against official IRS, Social Security and state examples, an outside tax calculator and published research.
Your data
Where your plan is kept
The demo stores nothing. It runs on a sample plan, and nothing you change there is written down anywhere.
An account saves your plans on our server, encrypted in transit and at rest, so you can open the same plan on a laptop and on a phone.
You can export a plan as a file at any time, and you can delete your account, with every plan in it, from the account page.
What it costs
You buy it once
| What you get | One-time price |
|---|---|
| Planner with your own numbers, saved plans | $18 |
| What-if tool, added to the planner | $20 |
| PDF report, added to the planner. Buy once, build as many as you want. | $20 |
| What-if and PDF report together, added to the planner | $30 |
| Full bundle: the planner, What-if and PDF report | $50 |
The Report puts your retirement plan in one PDF, made for you and kept in your account. See a sample report.
You pay once for each part, and there is no subscription. Updates to the parts you own are included. New features may be sold on their own. The demo is not limited by time; it uses sample plans instead of yours.
Prices in US dollars. Tax is added at checkout where it applies.
On Instagram
One plan, one chart at a time
Every post runs a real plan through the planner and shows what history did to it. Follow @retireplanapp for the next one.
