Audited —·Last updated 27 Jul 2026·8 citations·Tier 1·0 uses

401(k) Retirement Calculator

Free 401k calculator. Project your retirement balance with employer match, salary growth, and compounding returns to age 65 using IRS 2025 contribution limits.

401(k) Retirement Calculator

Current 401(k) balanceThe current value of your 401(k) account today. Include only this plan's balance — do not roll in IRAs or other employer plans unless you intend to transfer them.

Annual gross salaryYour current gross (pre-tax) annual salary. 401(k) elective deferrals are calculated as a percentage of gross pay, not take-home, so use the salary line from your offer letter or W-2 box 1 plus deferrals.

Your contribution rateThe percentage of gross salary you defer into the 401(k) each year. The IRS 2025 elective-deferral limit is $23,500 ($31,000 if age 50+ with catch-up); the calculator does not cap your input but real plans will.

Employer match rateThe rate at which your employer matches each dollar you contribute, up to the cap below. A '50% match' means the employer adds $0.50 for every $1.00 you defer. A '100% match' (dollar-for-dollar) is common at large employers.

Match cap (% of salary)The maximum percentage of your salary on which the employer match applies. A typical formula is '50% match up to 6% of salary' — meaning the employer match stops once your own deferral exceeds 6% of pay.

Expected annual returnLong-run average annual return on your 401(k) investments. Historical US 60/40 portfolios returned roughly 7%–8% nominal; target-date funds typically project 5%–7%. Use a conservative figure within 10 years of retirement.

Years to retirementYears from today until you stop contributing and begin drawing the balance. Standard full retirement age in the US is 67 for those born after 1960 (per Social Security Act amendments).

yrs

Annual salary growthExpected annual raise rate. Bureau of Labor Statistics ECI data shows median private-sector wage growth around 3%–4% annually since 2000. Use 3% as a defensible long-run baseline.

Balance at retirement

$1,328,381.61

The projected value of your 401(k) account on the day you retire, including your contributions, the full stream of employer matching deposits, and all compounded investment growth. Expressed in nominal future dollars at the assumed annual return.

Your total contributions

$217,663.49

Total employer match

$108,831.75

Total investment growth

$976,886.36

Monthly contribution

$300.00

Background.

A 401k calculator projects the future value of your employer-sponsored retirement account by compounding three streams — your own elective deferrals, your employer's matching contributions, and the investment growth on the running balance — across the years between today and your retirement date. The 401(k) is the defining American retirement vehicle, codified in Section 401(k) of the Internal Revenue Code after the Revenue Act of 1978 created the legal carve-out that permits employees to defer a portion of compensation into a qualified plan on a pre-tax basis. The Department of Labor's most recent 'Private Pension Plan Bulletin' reports more than 70 million active participants and over $7 trillion in 401(k) plan assets, making it the single largest pool of private retirement savings in the world.

The mechanics matter for every dollar that flows into the account. Each year you elect to defer a percentage of your gross salary — capped by the IRS at $23,500 for 2025 (Revenue Procedure 2024-40), with an additional $7,500 catch-up contribution permitted for participants age 50 and older, plus a new SECURE Act 2.0 'super catch-up' of $11,250 for participants aged 60 to 63 starting in 2025. Most employers match some fraction of your contribution up to a cap expressed as a percentage of salary — the median formula across large US plans, per Vanguard's 2024 'How America Saves' report, is a 50% match on the first 6% of salary deferred, meaning if you contribute 6% the employer adds 3% on top. That employer money is the highest-return asset in personal finance: a 50% match is an instant, guaranteed 50% return before a single dollar of market return is earned.

The calculator runs a year-by-year compounding loop rather than the closed-form annuity formula because salary growth and the match cap make every year's contribution different. For each year it grows your salary by the assumed growth rate, computes that year's employee deferral, computes the match (capped at the lower of your deferral and the match cap), applies the assumed investment return to the running balance, and then adds both contribution streams. The result is the four numbers that govern your retirement: balance at retirement, total employee contributions, total employer match, and the investment growth that compounding contributed on top. Enter your current balance, salary, contribution rate, the match formula your plan offers, an expected annual return, your salary growth rate, and the years until retirement, and the calculator will report your projected 401(k) balance at retirement, your monthly contribution, and a clean breakdown of where every dollar of that balance came from.

A few honest cautions the math does not silently paper over. The model uses a constant deterministic return rate rather than simulating a sequence of returns, which is appropriate for accumulation-phase planning but understates risk in the years immediately before and after retirement; for decumulation planning use Monte Carlo tools like Portfolio Visualizer or Big ERN's spreadsheet. The model does not enforce the IRS elective-deferral limit, so if you input a contribution rate that produces a deferral above $23,500 on your current salary, real-world payroll will cap you.

The projected balance is in nominal future dollars — at 3% inflation, $1,000,000 in 35 years has the purchasing power of roughly $355,000 today, so plan accordingly when sizing a target. Traditional 401(k) withdrawals are taxed as ordinary income; a Roth 401(k) contribution stream is post-tax going in and tax-free coming out, but the balance projection itself is identical — only the after-tax usable amount differs. Required Minimum Distributions begin at age 73 under SECURE Act 2.0 (Public Law 117-328, December 2022), and will rise to 75 for participants born in 1960 or later beginning in 2033. Use this as the canonical first-pass tool, then layer in tax planning, Roth conversion strategy, and sequence-of-returns modeling as you near the date.

What is 401(k) retirement calculator?

A 401(k) is a defined-contribution, tax-qualified employer-sponsored retirement plan authorized under Section 401(k) of the Internal Revenue Code. Employees elect to defer a portion of compensation each pay period into an individual account inside the plan; the deferrals reduce current taxable income (in a traditional 401(k)) and grow tax-deferred until withdrawal, when they are taxed as ordinary income. A Roth 401(k) variant — added by the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 and available in plans since 2006 — accepts contributions on a post-tax basis but permits tax-free qualified withdrawals in retirement. Most plans add an employer match: dollars the company contributes on top of the employee's own deferrals according to a formula in the plan document, most commonly a partial or full match on the first 3% to 6% of salary. Employer contributions are subject to a vesting schedule, which determines how much of the match the employee keeps if they leave the company; under ERISA and the Pension Protection Act of 2006, plans must use either three-year cliff vesting (0% before three years, 100% after) or six-year graded vesting (20% per year from year two through year six) for employer matching contributions. Annual contribution limits are set by the IRS via Revenue Procedures: for 2025, the elective-deferral limit is $23,500, with a $7,500 catch-up for participants aged 50 and over and a new $11,250 SECURE 2.0 super catch-up for ages 60 to 63. Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) begin at age 73 under SECURE Act 2.0; the RMD age rises to 75 in 2033 for participants born in 1960 or later. On separation from service, a participant typically has four choices: leave the balance in the former employer's plan, roll the balance into a new employer's 401(k), roll it into a traditional or Roth IRA (the most common and most flexible option), or cash out — which triggers ordinary income tax plus a 10% early-withdrawal penalty if the participant is under 59½.

How to use this calculator.

Enter your current 401(k) balance. Pull this from your latest plan statement or the plan-administrator website (Fidelity NetBenefits, Vanguard, Empower, Schwab Workplace, etc.). Include only the balance of the 401(k) you are projecting — do not roll in IRAs or other employer plans unless you intend to consolidate them.
Enter your annual gross salary. Use the pre-tax figure from your offer letter, W-2 box 1 plus pre-tax deferrals, or the gross line on your most recent pay stub annualized. The calculator computes your contribution as a percentage of gross pay, matching how real 401(k) payroll deductions work.
Enter your contribution rate. Pick the percentage of gross salary you elect to defer. At minimum, contribute enough to capture the full employer match — anything less is leaving free money on the table. The 2025 IRS elective-deferral cap is $23,500; if your percentage times salary exceeds this, payroll will cap you at the limit.
Enter the employer match formula. The match rate is how many cents on the dollar the employer contributes (e.g. 50% for a half-match, 100% for a full dollar-for-dollar match). The match cap is the maximum percent of salary on which the match applies. Vanguard's 2024 'How America Saves' reports the most common large-employer formula is '50% match on the first 6% of pay' — enter 50% match rate and 6% cap.
Enter your expected annual return. Historical US 60/40 portfolios have returned roughly 7%–8% nominal annualized over the past century. A diversified target-date fund typical of 401(k) menus projects 5%–7% over a long horizon. Use 7% as a defensible long-run baseline; sensitivity-test at 5% and 9%.
Enter years to retirement and annual salary growth rate. Years to retirement is straightforward — your retirement target age minus your current age. Salary growth typically averages 3%–4% per year per Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Cost Index data; use 3% as a baseline if you do not have employer-specific raise history.

The formula.

Bᵢ = Bᵢ₋₁ × (1 + r) + Eᵢ + Mᵢ

Bᵢ · balance after year ir · annual returnEᵢ · your contribution, year iMᵢ · employer match, year i

The projection is a year-by-year compounding loop rather than a closed-form formula, because salary growth and the match cap make every year's contribution different in dollar terms. For each year i from 1 to yearsToRetirement, the calculator computes salary_i = annualSalary × (1 + salaryGrowth)^(i−1), where year 1 uses the input salary unchanged and each subsequent year grows by the salary growth rate. The employee's contribution that year is employee_i = salary_i × employeeContribPercent / 100. The employer match is computed in two steps: first the match cap in dollars is matchCap_i = salary_i × employerMatchCapPercent / 100, then the match base is the smaller of the employee contribution and the cap (matchBase_i = min(employee_i, matchCap_i)), and finally the employer's deposit is employer_i = matchBase_i × employerMatchPercent / 100. This handles the standard '50% match on the first 6%' formula correctly — if the employee contributes 4%, the match base is 4% of salary (capped by the employee deferral); if the employee contributes 10%, the match base is 6% of salary (capped by the plan cap). The balance updates each year as balance_i = balance_{i−1} × (1 + annualReturn) + employee_i + employer_i — contributions are added at the end of the year (an ordinary annuity), which slightly understates the result versus a more granular monthly model but matches conventional retirement-calculator methodology. After the loop completes, the calculator reports the final balance as the projected retirement value, sums the two contribution streams to give total employee and employer contributions, and computes total investment growth as final balance minus starting balance minus both contribution totals. The monthly contribution figure is the initial-year annual deferral divided by 12. All arithmetic is performed in full Decimal precision to avoid floating-point error accumulation over 35-year horizons, with rounding to cents only on final outputs. The future-value-of-annuity intuition underneath is that the employee contribution stream grows by (salaryGrowth) per year while the balance grows by (annualReturn) per year — when annualReturn exceeds salaryGrowth (the normal case), the compounded growth on early-year contributions ends up dominating the late-year contributions themselves, which is why financial planners stress contributing early and capturing the full match from day one.

A worked example.

Example

Consider a 30-year-old earning $60,000 per year with $25,000 already in a 401(k), contributing 6% of salary, receiving a 50% employer match on contributions up to 6% of salary, earning an assumed 7% annual return, and receiving 3% annual salary growth for 35 years. The initial employee contribution is $3,600 per year and the initial employer match is $1,800. Applying the contribution, match, salary-growth, and annual compounding rules year by year produces a projected retirement balance of $1,328,381.61. Total employee contributions are $217,663.49, employer contributions are $108,831.75, and investment growth is $976,886.36 after subtracting the $25,000 starting balance and all later contributions. The initial monthly employee contribution is $300.

annual Return Percent7

annual Salary60,000

employer Match Cap Percent6

employer Match Percent50

current Balance25,000

employee Contrib Percent6

annual Salary Growth Percent3

years To Retirement35

Frequently asked questions.

What is the difference between a traditional 401(k) and a Roth 401(k)?

The difference is the timing of taxation. A traditional 401(k) is funded with pre-tax dollars — your contribution reduces your taxable income in the year you make it, the balance grows tax-deferred, and every dollar you withdraw in retirement is taxed as ordinary income at your then-current federal and state rates. A Roth 401(k), authorized by the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 and available in plans since 2006, is funded with post-tax dollars — your contribution does not reduce current taxable income, but the balance grows tax-free and qualified withdrawals after age 59½ (and at least five years after the first Roth contribution) are entirely tax-free. The right choice depends on whether you expect your tax rate in retirement to be higher or lower than today. A general rule of thumb: high earners in peak earning years usually benefit from traditional because their retirement rate is likely lower; younger savers in lower brackets, or anyone who expects future tax rates to rise broadly, usually benefit from Roth. Most plans now allow both, and many savers split contributions across the two. The IRS contribution limit ($23,500 in 2025) applies to the combined total. Employer match contributions are always made on a pre-tax basis even in a Roth account, per IRS regulations — though SECURE Act 2.0 (effective 2024) now permits plans to optionally allow Roth employer matches if the employee elects.

How much is the employer 401(k) match actually worth?

It is the highest-return part of your compensation, full stop. A 50% match on the first 6% of salary means that contributing 6% delivers an instant 50% return — for every $100 you defer, the employer adds $50 on top before a single dollar of market growth is earned. On a $60,000 salary, contributing 6% ($3,600) captures $1,800 of employer money per year. Over a 35-year career with 3% salary growth, that match stream alone totals approximately $117,000 of direct employer contributions, and when you compound those contributions at a 7% return over the same horizon they grow to roughly $430,000 of final 401(k) value — purely from the match. Vanguard's 2024 'How America Saves' report finds that 96% of large 401(k) plans offer an employer match, with the median formula being 50% on the first 6% of pay (so 3% of total salary in employer money) and the average employer contribution rate across all participants being 4.6% of pay. The Plan Sponsor Council of America reports that one in five participants does not contribute enough to capture the full match — leaving an average of $1,300 to $1,800 of free money per worker per year unclaimed. The single highest-impact action almost any 401(k) participant can take is to raise their contribution rate to at least the match cap.

What is a 401(k) vesting schedule and how does it affect me?

Vesting determines what portion of your employer's matching contributions you actually get to keep if you leave the company. Your own elective deferrals are always 100% vested immediately — they are your money the moment they hit the account. Employer contributions follow one of two ERISA-compliant schedules, per the Pension Protection Act of 2006. Three-year cliff vesting means you are 0% vested in employer money until you complete three years of service, at which point you become 100% vested. Six-year graded vesting means you become 20% vested after two years of service and gain another 20% per year, reaching 100% after six years. About 45% of large plans (per Vanguard 2024) use immediate vesting — employer money is yours from day one. The remainder use one of the two schedules above. Practically: if you leave a job after 18 months and your employer used a 3-year cliff schedule, you forfeit 100% of the employer match in your account (your own contributions stay with you). If they used a 6-year graded schedule, you have completed one full year and forfeit all employer money. Check your Summary Plan Description (SPD) before leaving a job — the unvested forfeitures can be tens of thousands of dollars at higher salaries, and sometimes it is worth delaying a job change by a few months to cross the next vesting milestone.

What happens to my 401(k) when I change jobs?

You have four options when you separate from service. First, leave the balance in the former employer's 401(k) — most plans permit this for balances above $7,000 (the 2024 SECURE 2.0 cash-out threshold). Second, roll the balance into the new employer's 401(k) plan if the new plan accepts rollovers — this consolidates accounts but limits you to the new plan's investment menu and fees. Third, execute a direct rollover into a traditional IRA at a brokerage of your choice (Fidelity, Vanguard, Schwab) — this is by far the most popular and most flexible option because IRAs offer access to thousands of funds and ETFs versus the typical 401(k) menu of 15 to 30 options, and IRA fees are often lower. A direct rollover is non-taxable and reportable on Form 1099-R with code G. Fourth, cash out — which triggers ordinary income tax on the entire balance plus a 10% early-withdrawal penalty if you are under age 59½, and the plan administrator will withhold 20% for federal taxes immediately. Cashing out a $50,000 balance at age 30 in the 22% federal bracket nets you roughly $35,000 after tax and penalty, and forfeits roughly $375,000 of future retirement value at a 7% return over 35 years. The Department of Labor's 2024 Retirement Security Rule explicitly directs fiduciary advisors to weigh rollover decisions in the participant's best interest, but the math almost always favors a direct rollover to an IRA over a cash-out.

When do I have to start taking money out of my 401(k)?

Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) begin at age 73 under SECURE Act 2.0, the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023 (Public Law 117-328) signed into law in December 2022. The act raised the RMD age from 72 to 73 effective January 1, 2023, and provides for a further increase to age 75 starting in 2033 for participants born in 1960 or later. RMDs are calculated by dividing your December 31 prior-year balance by an IRS Uniform Lifetime Table factor based on your age — at age 73 the factor is 26.5, giving an initial RMD of roughly 3.77% of the prior-year balance. The amount rises each year as the divisor shrinks. Failure to take an RMD now triggers a 25% excise tax (reduced from 50% by SECURE Act 2.0), which drops to 10% if corrected within two years. Two important exceptions. First, if you are still working at age 73 and own less than 5% of the company sponsoring the plan, you can delay RMDs from that plan until you actually retire (the 'still-working exception' — only applies to your current employer's 401(k), not IRAs or former-employer plans). Second, SECURE Act 2.0 eliminated lifetime RMDs from Roth 401(k) accounts effective 2024 — Roth 401(k) balances now follow the same RMD-free rules as Roth IRAs during the original owner's lifetime. Plan distributions before age 59½ trigger a 10% early-withdrawal penalty in addition to ordinary income tax, with limited exceptions for disability, qualified medical expenses, the rule of 55 (separation from service in or after the year you turn 55), and SECURE 2.0's new emergency-withdrawal provisions.

How much should I be contributing to my 401(k) at my age?

Fidelity's widely cited retirement-readiness benchmarks recommend the following multiples of salary saved by age: 1x by 30, 3x by 40, 6x by 50, 8x by 60, and 10x by 67. To hit those targets the same research suggests saving 15% of gross income annually starting at age 25, inclusive of the employer match — so if your match is 3% of pay, you need to defer 12% yourself. Vanguard's 2024 'How America Saves' reports the average employee deferral rate is 7.4% of pay and the average total contribution rate (employee plus employer) is 11.7% — meaningful, but below the 15% benchmark for most savers. T. Rowe Price's 2024 retirement-savings research recommends 15% to 20% for participants who start saving in their 30s and 20%+ for those who start in their 40s. The single highest-impact action is to enroll in automatic annual escalation — most plans now offer to raise your contribution rate by 1% every year up to a cap, which research from the Behavioral Economics literature (Thaler and Benartzi's 'Save More Tomorrow' program) shows raises actual contribution rates dramatically without requiring active decisions. At minimum, contribute enough to capture the full employer match; ideally, work up to 15% of gross pay including the match within five years of starting your career.

Are the IRS 401(k) contribution limits indexed to inflation?

Yes. The IRS adjusts the elective-deferral limit, the catch-up contribution limit, the total defined-contribution limit (Section 415(c)), and the compensation limit (Section 401(a)(17)) annually for inflation using a cost-of-living formula tied to the CPI-U, then publishes the new limits each fall in a Revenue Procedure. For 2025 the IRS announced in Revenue Procedure 2024-40 that the elective-deferral limit is $23,500 (up from $23,000 in 2024), the age-50 catch-up is $7,500 (unchanged), the total contribution limit including employer match is $70,000 (up from $69,000), and the compensation limit is $350,000. A new SECURE Act 2.0 provision effective 2025 creates a 'super catch-up' for participants aged 60 to 63, allowing an extra $11,250 in catch-up contributions in those four years specifically — designed to give late-career savers a final accumulation push. Starting in 2026, SECURE 2.0 also requires that catch-up contributions for high earners (those with prior-year wages above $145,000, also CPI-indexed) be made as Roth contributions rather than traditional. The compensation limit caps the salary on which employer matching and profit-sharing formulas can be applied — at the $350,000 cap, even a generous 6% match cap means employer match maxes out at $21,000 from a single plan regardless of the participant's actual income.

Can I borrow from my 401(k), and should I?

Most plans allow loans, but the decision deserves careful analysis. Under IRC Section 72(p), participants can borrow up to the lesser of $50,000 or 50% of the vested balance, with a maximum five-year repayment period (extendable to up to 25 years for a primary residence purchase). Loan repayments are made through payroll deduction at an interest rate typically set at the prime rate plus 1%; the interest is paid back to your own account, which sounds appealing. The hidden costs are significant. First, the borrowed funds stop earning market returns — at a 7% expected return on a $30,000 loan over five years, the opportunity cost is approximately $12,000 of forgone growth. Second, the repayments are made with after-tax dollars but those same dollars get taxed again when withdrawn in retirement — effectively double taxation on the loan principal. Third, and most dangerous, if you leave the company before the loan is repaid, the outstanding balance is treated as a deemed distribution: it becomes immediately taxable as ordinary income plus a 10% early-withdrawal penalty if you are under 59½. SECURE Act 2.0 extended the grace period for repaying a separation-time outstanding loan from 60 days to the participant's tax filing deadline including extensions — helpful, but not a fix. The Federal Reserve's 2023 Survey of Consumer Finances found that roughly 13% of 401(k) participants have an outstanding loan, and academic research from Beshears, Choi, Laibson, and Madrian shows that 401(k) loan availability measurably raises plan participation but lowers retirement wealth on average. Use 401(k) loans only as a last resort, never for discretionary spending, and only if you are confident in job stability through the repayment period.

Does this calculator account for inflation?

Not directly — the projected balance is reported in nominal future dollars at the assumed annual return, not in today's purchasing power. This is the standard convention for retirement projections shown on plan-administrator websites (Fidelity NetBenefits, Vanguard, Empower, Schwab Workplace), and it is the right convention if you want the number to match what your account statement will actually show on the projected date. However, the same nominal dollar buys less in the future. At a long-run US CPI inflation rate of about 3% annually, a projected $1,200,000 balance in 35 years has the purchasing power of roughly $425,000 in today's dollars; at 2.5% inflation (closer to the Federal Reserve's target) the same balance is worth about $507,000 today. To convert any nominal projection to today's dollars, divide by (1 + inflation)^years — or, equivalently, run the calculator with a real (inflation-adjusted) return assumption: a 7% nominal return at 3% inflation is roughly a 3.88% real return per the Fisher equation (1 + real) = (1 + nominal) / (1 + inflation). Run the model both ways. Use the nominal projection to plan for your stated dollar target; use a real-return version (about 4%) to understand the purchasing power you are actually accumulating. For decumulation modeling, where inflation interacts with safe withdrawal rates and Social Security cost-of-living adjustments, use the Quanta FIRE calculator or Monte Carlo tools that explicitly model the inflation stream.

What annual return assumption should I use for a 401(k) projection?

It depends on your investment mix and your tolerance for being wrong. Historical long-run nominal returns from Robert Shiller's database, Dimson-Marsh-Staunton's Credit Suisse Global Investment Returns Yearbook, and Jeremy Siegel's Stocks for the Long Run give the following ballpark figures for US assets since 1926: large-cap US equities about 10% nominal, US bonds about 5% nominal, a 60/40 stock-bond portfolio about 8% nominal. Most 401(k) target-date funds — the default option in 80%+ of plans per Vanguard 2024 — project 5% to 7% nominal returns for participants 20+ years from retirement, declining to 4% to 5% as the glide path shifts toward bonds in the decade before retirement. Vanguard's 10-year capital-market assumptions published December 2024 forecast 4.0% to 6.0% annualized US equity returns and 4.4% to 5.4% bond returns for the 2025–2035 decade, somewhat below historical averages because of elevated equity valuations and a more normal interest-rate environment. A defensible 2026 planning assumption: 7% nominal for a stock-heavy portfolio held for 30+ years (close to historical 60/40), 6% for a balanced target-date fund, 5% for a conservative allocation. Run the calculator at your central estimate, then at plus and minus 1.5% to understand how brittle the projection is — the range between a 5.5% and 8.5% return assumption over 35 years can change the final balance by 60%+ on the same contribution stream, which is sobering and worth seeing on screen.

References& sources.

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