Every free retirement calculator lies to you about taxes.
They project a straight line, ignore the tax code, and hand you a number you make a decision from. We built the one that doesn't — real 2026 brackets, RMDs, IRMAA cliffs, withdrawal order, and 500 market paths. It's free, it runs in your browser, and it will probably tell you something you didn't want to hear.
Run the real number See the calculators
What the big ones actually do
The largest free retirement calculator on the internet — the one attached to the biggest advisor-matching business in the country — uses a deterministic straight-line projection: one fixed rate of return, every year, forever. No Monte Carlo. No tax-aware drawdown. No Roth analysis. A hardcoded lifespan.
It is a lead-generation front end wearing a planning engine's clothes. It's not that they can't do better. It's that a calculator only has to feel like an answer to get you to the form.
The three numbers
Ask "will my money last?" and there are three honest answers. Free calculators give you the first one and stop.
Calculators
Which account should you spend first?
The order you draw from your accounts changes your lifetime tax bill by six figures. No free calculator models it. This one does.
Closes at 73 or 75Your Roth conversion window
The years between retiring and RMDs are the cheapest tax years you will ever have. See how much room you actually have — and whether it's worth it.
A cliff, not a rampThe Medicare IRMAA cliff
One dollar of income over the line costs you about a thousand dollars a year, two years later. See where the cliffs sit and how close you are.
SECURE 2.0What the IRS will force you to withdraw
At 73 or 75 the government starts emptying your IRA on its schedule, not yours. See the size of it and what it does to your bracket.
How we make money, in one paragraph
The calculators are free and take nothing from you — no signup, no email wall, and the numbers you type never leave your browser because there's no server to send them to. If you ask to be introduced to a financial advisor, the firm pays us a flat fee. The same fee for every firm, so we have no reason to steer you toward one. We take no money at all from the long-term-care insurance industry, because we won't be paid by an industry our tools adjudicate.
And below roughly 500k in investable assets we don't show you an advisor offer at all — an advisor won't take the client, and pretending otherwise wastes your time to maybe earn us a fee. The long version, including the parts that don't flatter us.
Questions with actual numbers in them
“We're 61 with $1.4M. Can we retire now?”
The straight-line answer is yes. The tax-aware answer is more interesting.
“I'm 64 with $2M in an IRA. Is a Roth conversion still worth it?”
You have a window. It closes at 75, and it may already be full.
“Does it really matter which account I spend first?”
Six figures, on a seven-figure portfolio. Here's the arithmetic.