Retirement Calculator — how much corpus do you need?

About the Retirement Calculator

Retirement planning in India is a three-variable problem: how long you'll live after retiring, how inflation erodes your money's value, and what return your corpus generates in retirement. Indian life expectancy at age 60 is now ~21 years and rising — meaning anyone retiring at 60 must plan for 25–30 years of post-retirement income, not the 10–15 years their parents' generation needed. Healthcare costs, lifestyle inflation, and the absence of robust government pensions for the private sector make this one of the most important calculations any working Indian can run.

This calculator uses a two-phase model. Pre-retirement: you invest at a higher-return portfolio (typically equity-heavy, 70–80% in equity mutual funds, balance in PPF/EPF/NPS). Post-retirement: you shift to lower-risk allocations (debt-heavy, 40–60% debt, rest in conservative equity) and withdraw gradually, assuming annual inflation in expenses. The math compounds the corpus through both phases — first growing it, then drawing it down.

The monthly SIP shown is what you'd need to invest from today to hit your retirement corpus. Rising inflation (from 6% to 7%) can increase required SIP by 30–40% — it's the single biggest lever in the model after starting age. Try this experiment: enter your current age, push retirement age from 55 to 65, and watch the required monthly SIP halve. Then push it to 70 and it nearly halves again. Working an extra 5 years at the back end has dramatically more financial impact than saving harder in your 30s.

What this calculator deliberately understates: medical inflation (India's medical CPI has averaged 12–14% over the last decade — meaning healthcare costs roughly double every 5–6 years), lifestyle creep, lump-sum needs (children's wedding, gifts to grandchildren, helping aged parents), and the cost of round-the-clock care if life expectancy stretches past 85. A practical correction: take the 'corpus needed' number from this calculator and multiply by 1.3–1.5x to build a buffer for health and lifestyle inflation.

Indian retirement reality check: most Indian salaried professionals dramatically under-save. Average EPF balance at retirement is just ₹6–8 lakh, which generates barely ₹4,000/month in safe income. The corpus this calculator typically suggests (₹4–8 crore for a middle-income lifestyle) feels enormous, but is mathematically correct given inflation and longevity. Start early: ₹10,000/month from age 25 at 12% builds ₹3.4 crore by 60. The same ₹10,000/month started at 35 builds only ₹1 crore. The decade between 25 and 35 is where the entire retirement picture is decided.