Retirement & investing · free calculator
Safe withdrawal rate calculator
Run the 4% rule (and variants 3%-5%) against your portfolio to project annual safe withdrawals over a defined retirement length.
Year 1 withdrawal
Show the work
- Total nominal withdrawn$2,854,525
- Projected ending balance$2,277,094
- Real return (after inflation + fees)3.50%
The 4% rule — what Bengen actually said
The 4% rule (William Bengen, 1994) says: withdraw 4% of your starting portfolio in year 1, then increase that withdrawal each year by inflation. With a 60/40 stock/bond portfolio, this rule survived all 30-year retirement starting points from 1926-1990 in his backtest.
Where the math is sensitive
- Sequence of returns — bad first 5 years torpedoes 30-year survival even with great average returns
- Inflation — 4% nominal is fine, 4% real is the actual rule
- Fees — 0.5% advisor fee compounds to ~12% portfolio loss over 30 years
The variants
- 3% — Cooper / Pfau extended-retirement variant for 40+ year horizons
- 4% — Bengen baseline, 30-year horizon
- 4.5% — Bengen 2024 update with broader asset allocation including small-cap value
- 5% — Aggressive, requires flexibility (cut withdrawals in down markets)
What this calculator misses
- Variable withdrawal strategies (Guyton-Klinger guardrails)
- Tax-stacking optimization across taxable / 401k / Roth buckets
- Social Security claim-age interactions
- Discretionary vs essential spending split (the "smile" curve)
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