How much is enough to retire?

Your number is your annual spending gap divided by a withdrawal rate — not a salary multiple. Here is how to compute it, and the honest range.

There is a real answer to this, it takes about ten minutes, and it is not a multiple of your salary.

Two tools do the arithmetic for you: the free retirement checkup gives you a target range and the risks attached to it, and am I on track compares that target against what you are projected to have. Everything below explains what those tools are doing and why, so you can argue with them.

This is a core spoke of the Retirement hub.

Your number is a spending problem, not a net-worth problem

The question "how much do I need" is really three questions stacked:

1. What will you spend in a year of retirement, in today's dollars?
2. What arrives regardless — Social Security, a pension, an annuity?
3. What is left over — the gap your portfolio has to cover, forever?

Only the third number needs a portfolio. Get this order wrong and you build a target for money you were never going to have to produce.

The guaranteed-income step is the one people skip, and it is the largest. The average retired-worker Social Security benefit in 2026 is $2,071 a month — just under $25,000 a year, and roughly double that for a couple who both worked. Estimate yours from your own SSA statement, not from the average, and remember that when you claim moves it a long way in both directions. See Social Security timing.

Turn the gap into a portfolio target

Divide the annual gap by a planning withdrawal rate. That is the whole model.

The rate is disputed, and honestly so. The two credible current figures are Morningstar's forward-looking 3.9% (a portfolio multiple of 25.6×) and Bengen's revised historical worst case, 4.7% (a multiple of 21.3×). They answer different questions — see the 4% rule in 2026 — so they give you a bracket, not a point.

Read that table honestly. The choice of withdrawal rate moves your target by about 20% — on a $50,000 gap, that is roughly $218,000, or several years of saving. Anyone who hands you a single number has quietly made that choice on your behalf and not told you which way.

Two rules for using the range:

• Do not average the two rates. They are not two measurements of one thing. A midpoint of 4.3% is a number with no source and no meaning.
• Do not treat the low end as the plan. Bengen's rate is a historical floor — the worst thing that has ever happened. Building to it and having no flexibility is a bet that nothing worse ever will.

Our checkup shows both ends of this bracket for exactly this reason.

Where salary multiples fit, and where they break

Fidelity's age-based savings factors are the best-known shortcut, and they are the table most people are actually looking for:

That is Fidelity's rule of thumb, not ours, and it is a fine sanity check at 35 when you have no idea what you will spend at 70.

But it is a crude heuristic, and Fidelity says so in its own footnotes. The multiples assume you save 15% of income a year, that your real wages grow 1.5% a year, that you retire at 67 and plan to 93, that you have no pension, and that your savings need to replace 45% of your pre-retirement income with Social Security covering the rest.

Change any of those and the multiple is wrong for you — sometimes very wrong:

• A high earner who saved 30% of income was never spending it. Replacing a percentage of that salary overshoots, possibly by years of unnecessary work.
• A household with a paid-off house and modest spending can be done well below 10×.
• Someone retiring at 58 needs more than the 67 target, and needs it sooner, and has a health-insurance bill the model never saw.

The multiple is keyed to income. Your portfolio has to fund spending. Those are different numbers, and the gap between them is the entire reason two people on identical salaries can need targets a million dollars apart.

The 70-80% replacement rule, and why it is weak

SSA's own booklet says "most financial advisers say you will need about 70% to 80% of pre-retirement income" to live comfortably. It is repeated everywhere.

Two things about it.

First, that figure includes Social Security. It is total household income, not what the portfolio has to produce. Plenty of people read it as a savings target and end up building for an income they were already going to receive.

Second, SSA's own research bulletin is blunt about where the number came from: "there is no single authoritative source for 70 percent as the appropriate replacement rate... 70 percent appears to be a rough consensus among financial planners." It is a survey of opinion, not a finding. When the agency publishing the rule of thumb tells you it has no basis, believe them.

Spending, measured from your own bank statements, beats a percentage of a salary you will no longer earn.

The line item that breaks early retirement

If you stop working before 65, health insurance becomes a bill you have never paid before, and it belongs in the spending number — not in a footnote.

The 2026 national-average unsubsidized premium for a 60-year-old is about $11,625 a year for the lowest-cost bronze plan and $15,914 for the benchmark silver plan. Premium tax credits can cut that a long way — but the enhanced subsidies expired at the end of 2025, and the 400%-of-poverty cliff is back. Cross it by one dollar and the entire credit is gone: for a single person that cliff sits at $62,600 of MAGI, and for a couple at $84,600.

That makes your withdrawal decisions and your insurance decisions the same decision from about age 55 to 65. Run it in the ACA bridge tool, and read health care before Medicare before you set a retirement date.

Then adjust the number you got

The first estimate is a starting line.

• Taxes. Your gap should be an after-tax spending figure, and withdrawals from a traditional 401(k) or IRA are ordinary income. If your money is mostly pre-tax, you have to withdraw more than you spend. Roth balances do not have this problem, which is one reason the mix matters as much as the total.
• Inflation is not one rate. Health care has run hotter than the general basket for decades, and it is the category that grows as a share of an older household's budget. See inflation and retirement.
• Sequence risk. A bad first decade does far more damage than a bad average. Stress-test it.
• Flexibility. A willingness to skip an inflation raise after a bad year buys more safety than any amount of arguing about the third decimal place of a withdrawal rate.

Key takeaways

• Your number = annual spending − guaranteed income, divided by a withdrawal rate. Nothing else in this article changes that.
• The rate is genuinely disputed: 3.9% (25.6×) forward-looking, 4.7% (21.3×) historical worst case. Use the bracket. Never average them.
• Salary multiples like Fidelity's 10× at 67 are a sanity check, not a target. They are keyed to income; your portfolio funds spending.
• The 70-80% replacement rule includes Social Security, and SSA itself says it has no authoritative basis.
• Retiring before 65 adds a health-insurance line item large enough to change the answer on its own.

Next: run the checkup for your own range, or test the round number on is $1 million enough.

Educational only — not financial or tax advice.