Balance at retirement
That's about $39,846 a year in retirement — what a 4% withdrawal would pay you each year without draining the balance.
Same math, shown. No hidden assumptions.
No sign-up. No email. We never sell your data.
A 401(k) is a workplace retirement account where your contributions are invested and grow over time. Three forces drive the final number: the money you contribute, any match your employer adds on top, and the compounding growth on both. The third one does most of the heavy lifting, and it is the part people consistently underestimate. This calculator projects all three so you can see how much of your retirement comes from saving versus simply staying invested.
Take a common setup: start with $10,000, contribute $500 a month on a $60,000 salary, with an employer that matches you dollar-for-dollar up to 5% of pay — that works out to $250 a month — growing at 7% a year for 30 years. Here is how the projected $996,143 breaks down:
You and your employer put in $270,000 between you, and growth added roughly $716,000 on top. Nearly three-quarters of the final balance is money neither of you ever deposited. That ratio is the whole point of starting early: the longer the runway, the larger the growth slice becomes relative to what you actually saved.
A match is the closest thing to a guaranteed return in personal finance — your employer hands you cash the moment you contribute, and then it compounds for decades. The cost of skipping it is larger than it looks. In the example above, the $90,000 your employer contributed over 30 years grows into about $305,000 of final balance. Not contributing enough to capture the full match means walking past that money on the table every paycheck. If your plan matches 50% of contributions up to 6% of pay, that 6% is the first target to hit before anything else.
Money invested in your twenties has decades to compound, and that head start is hard to make up later. Consider two savers, both putting away $750 a month:
The early saver put in a third of the money, stopped 30 years before retirement, and still finished ahead by more than $138,000. The ten years of growth they captured early outweighed three times the contributions made late. This is why "I'll start later when I earn more" is the most expensive sentence in retirement saving.
A seven-figure number is hard to feel. A common rule of thumb is that you can withdraw about 4% of a retirement balance in the first year and adjust for inflation after that. On the $996,143 projection above, 4% is roughly $39,846 a year, or about $3,320 a month, before taxes — on top of any Social Security. Translating the balance into a monthly income is the most honest way to judge whether you are on track.
The calculator compounds monthly. Each month your balance earns one twelfth of the annual return you chose, then your contribution and the employer match are added for the next month to grow on. The ledger bar under the headline number splits the total three ways — your money, the employer match, and the growth — so you can see at a glance how much of the result you saved versus how much compounding produced.
Does this include my employer match?
Yes. Enter your salary and your plan's match — the percentage it matches and the percentage of pay it matches up to — and the calculator works out the dollars your employer adds each month, then invests them alongside your own contribution so the match compounds too.
What return rate should I assume?
Many people use a long-run stock market figure near 7% after inflation, but real returns swing year to year. Try a range to see a cautious and an optimistic case.
Does it account for contribution limits or taxes?
No. It does not enforce the annual 401(k) limit or model taxes and fees, so the balance shown is a gross before-tax estimate of growth.
How is the balance compounded?
Monthly. Each month your balance earns one twelfth of the annual return, then your contribution and the employer match are added.
Last reviewed June 2026. This tool is for education, not financial advice.