How this calculator works

It's a UK retirement modelling tool. You enter your current pension, ISAs, savings, salary, and target spending, and it projects year by year how the numbers evolve from your current age to your end age — accounting for income tax, National Insurance, the state pension, and standard pension drawdown rules.

The goal is to help you spot whether your plan is roughly on track, and to compare alternatives (retire earlier vs later, contribute more vs less, drain pension first vs ISA first).

No. It's an illustrative model with simplifying assumptions and doesn't know your full circumstances. The numbers it produces are only as good as the inputs you give it.

Talk to a regulated financial adviser before making real decisions about your pension or retirement plan.

2025/26, England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

Scotland has different income tax bands and rates which are not modelled here. If you're in Scotland the income-tax numbers will be wrong; the rest of the structure (pension drawdown, LSA, ISA rules) still applies.

Standard 2025/26 UK bands (England, Wales, NI):

• Personal allowance: £12,570 (taper at £1 lost per £2 earned above £100,000)
• Basic rate 20% up to £50,270
• Higher rate 40% up to £125,140
• Additional rate 45% above £125,140

National Insurance (employment income only): 8% between £12,570 and £50,270, 2% above. State pension and pension drawdown are not subject to NI.

The LSA caps the amount of tax-free cash you can take from your pension across your lifetime at £268,275. The model tracks how much you've already used and stops generating new tax-free cash once you hit the cap.

Once exhausted, further crystallisations move money 1:1 into the taxable pot — no tax-free 25%. The "LSA used (start)" input lets you record allowance you've already used before the simulation starts.

Uncrystallised pension is your untouched pot. When you crystallise it, the standard UK rule kicks in:

• 25% becomes tax-free cash (TFC) and you choose where it goes
• 75% moves into a crystallised pot which you draw from later as taxable income

Both pots stay invested and continue to grow inside the pension wrapper. The model treats them separately because the tax treatment differs.

A planned action at a specific age. Add one in the Event card on the planner: type, age, amount, and where the tax-free cash should go. Common uses:

• Mortgage payoff — crystallise £X at 67, send TFC External
• Build cash buffer — crystallise pre-retirement, send TFC to Cash ISA
• Move to invested pot — send TFC to Stocks ISA

You can stack multiple events at different ages. They're applied in chronological order and respect the LSA.

The 25% tax-free cash leaves the model entirely. It doesn't appear as future income, doesn't reduce your spending need, and doesn't sit in any pot. Use it for genuine one-time expenses like paying off a mortgage.

The 75% taxable portion still goes into your crystallised pension and is available for income drawdown later. The LSA tracker still ticks up by the tax-free portion.

During retirement, if you need taxable income but your already-crystallised pot can't cover it, the model crystallises just enough uncrystallised pension to fill the gap — generating TFC into Cash ISA along the way (until the LSA is exhausted, after which it goes 1:1).

The "Auto-cryst" column shows how much was crystallised that year for this reason. It's separate from the manual events you add.

It controls the order in which the model funds retirement spending:

• Pension first (default) — draw on pension before ISAs. Preserves ISA tax efficiency for later years and your beneficiaries.
• ISA first — draw on ISAs before pension. Useful if you want to grow your pension as long as possible and don't mind reducing ISA tax shelter.

The State Pension and Current Account are always used first regardless — they're always available cash. Only the pension/ISA order is configurable.

Only in your browser's local storage. Nothing is sent to a server. The site is fully client-side — the only files served are HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and image assets.

If you clear your browser data, switch browsers, or use a different device, your scenarios won't be there. Use the Export button to back them up.

On the planner, in the Scenario card click Export. A JSON file is downloaded (excelergy-scenarios-YYYY-MM-DD.json). Save it somewhere safe.

To restore, click Import and select the file. Scenarios are merged in — existing ones with the same name are overwritten.

Same flow for moving between devices: export on one, transfer the file, import on the other.

Three fields in the Pension card capture this:

• Uncrystallised — the part you haven't touched yet
• Crystallised (start) — the value of any pot you've already moved to drawdown
• LSA used (start) — how much of the £268,275 lifetime tax-free cash limit you've already used

Get the LSA-used number from your pension provider's drawdown statement. If unsure, set it to 25% of the figure you see in "Crystallised (start)" — that's the typical ratio if your existing crystallisations were standard-rule.

Plenty of things, deliberately, to keep the model understandable:

• Scottish income tax bands
• Tapered pension annual allowance for high earners (income £260k+)
• MPAA — Money Purchase Annual Allowance restrictions after flexible drawdown
• Defined benefit pensions and final-salary schemes
• General Investment Account (GIA) capital gains tax
• Property income / rental yields
• Annuities and care-cost annuity hybrids
• Inheritance tax planning
• Variable returns / Monte Carlo / sequence-of-returns risk

If any of these dominate your plan, this calculator will under-tell the story — talk to an adviser.

The tax bands, NI thresholds, state pension figure, LSA limit, and ISA allowance are correct for the 2025/26 UK tax year. The drawdown logic mirrors standard pension rules.

Year-on-year compounding may drift by a few pounds over decades due to floating-point arithmetic — not material.

The biggest source of error is your input assumptions: growth rates, charge, inflation, and what your salary or contributions will actually look like. The engine does what you tell it; it doesn't predict the future.