Retirement Planning 2026: Corpus, SIP & SWP Advance Calculator
India's most comprehensive retirement planning tool for salaried professionals - an advance calculator. Calculate the retirement corpus you actually need, the monthly SIP required to reach it, a safe SWP withdrawal rate once you get there, and a single Readiness Score that ties it all together.
Why retirement planning in India needs more than a single number
Most retirement calculators available in India today ask for one figure - your current savings - and give back one number - your target corpus. That single-input, single-output approach misses two things that genuinely change the answer: first, that most working professionals don't hold their savings in one place, but spread across equity mutual funds, EPF, NPS, fixed deposits, and other instruments, each compounding at a meaningfully different rate; and second, that a retirement corpus isn't a finish line but the start of a multi-decade drawdown, where how fast you spend it matters as much as how much you've built. This calculator models both explicitly, rather than folding them into a single, oversimplified assumption.
Understanding your Retirement Corpus Required (RCR)
Your Retirement Corpus Required is the lump sum you'd need on the day you retire to fund your entire remaining lifestyle, given how long that money needs to last and how it continues to grow while you draw it down. It isn't simply your monthly expense multiplied by however many years you expect to live - it accounts for your expenses continuing to rise with inflation throughout retirement, offset by the return your remaining corpus keeps earning even as you withdraw from it. Get either input wrong - inflation too low, or your remaining post-retirement return too optimistic - and the corpus figure can be off by a wide margin, which is exactly why this calculator lets you adjust both independently and see the result update immediately.
Why a multi-asset approach changes the answer
Equity mutual funds, EPF, NPS, and fixed deposits don't serve the same purpose in a retirement plan, and treating them as one undifferentiated "savings" figure hides real differences in how each grows. As of FY 2025-26, EPF carries a government-declared interest rate of 8.25% per annum, offering low-volatility, tax-advantaged growth. NPS, being market-linked, has delivered roughly 9-11% CAGR over rolling 10-year periods depending on the equity allocation chosen within its life-cycle funds. Equity mutual funds carry higher expected long-term returns alongside meaningfully higher short-term volatility. Fixed deposits offer the most predictable, lowest returns of the group. A plan that averages all of this into one blended rate obscures how much of your eventual corpus is coming from where - this calculator keeps each asset class separate, both as an input and in the year-by-year projection, so the actual contribution of each is visible rather than assumed.
The life expectancy trap: why your real retirement horizon is longer than you think
India's average life expectancy at birth is around 72-73 years, and it's tempting to plan a retirement duration based on that number. But life expectancy at birth is dragged down by mortality earlier in life - someone who has already reached age 60 has, on average, a meaningfully longer remaining lifespan than that birth-cohort figure suggests, since they've already outlived the causes of earlier death. Planning your retirement duration off the birth-year figure risks underfunding what could genuinely be a 25-30+ year retirement, not the 15-20 years a birth-expectancy number might imply. This calculator asks directly for your expected life expectancy as an input specifically to avoid this trap - worth setting it deliberately higher than a headline national average, rather than accepting it at face value.
The dual-inflation trap: lifestyle inflation vs. healthcare inflation
A single inflation assumption applied uniformly across your entire retirement plan quietly understates one of the largest expense categories most retirees actually face. General lifestyle inflation in India has typically run in the 5-7% range, but healthcare cost inflation has historically run meaningfully higher - often cited in the 12-14% range - since medical costs, procedures, and insurance premiums have risen faster than the broader consumer price index for years. A retirement plan built entirely on a single, lifestyle-level inflation figure risks being comfortably funded for everyday expenses while falling meaningfully short on healthcare specifically, especially in the later years of retirement when medical needs are typically highest. Worth deliberately building some margin into your assumptions, or a separate healthcare reserve, rather than assuming one inflation rate covers every category of retirement spending equally.
Understanding Safe Withdrawal Rate (SWR) and corpus longevity
Reaching your target corpus on the day you retire is only half the picture - the other half is how long that corpus actually lasts once you start drawing from it every month. Your Safe Withdrawal Rate is the percentage of your total corpus you'd need to withdraw annually to cover your inflation-adjusted expenses, and it directly determines whether your corpus grows, holds steady, or depletes over your retirement years - this calculator shows not just that percentage, but the full year-by-year trajectory: the age at which your corpus is projected to peak, and the age at which it's projected to be fully depleted, if it depletes within your planning horizon at all.
Sequence of Return Risk (SORR): why the order of your returns matters, not just the average
Two retirees can earn the exact same average return over a 30-year retirement and end up with wildly different outcomes, purely because of the order those returns arrived in. A market downturn in the first few years of retirement, while you're actively withdrawing every month, forces you to sell a larger share of a shrinking corpus just to cover expenses - permanently reducing what's left to recover when markets eventually turn. The same downturn arriving in year 25 instead of year 2 does far less damage, since most of the corpus has already had decades to compound. This is Sequence of Return Risk, and it's precisely what a single, average-return projection - the kind most retirement calculators stop at - cannot show you, since averaging away the year-to-year sequence is exactly what erases this risk from view.
Monte Carlo simulation: stress-testing your plan against 1,000 possible futures
Rather than assume your post-retirement investments earn the same steady return every single year, this calculator's Monte Carlo simulation runs your entire retirement drawdown 1,000 times, randomizing the post-retirement return each year within a volatility range you set, so each of the 1,000 trials plays out a genuinely different sequence of good and bad years. A trial "succeeds" if your corpus lasts through your full retirement duration under that particular sequence of returns; the share of trials that succeed becomes your plan's Success Rate - a single, honest number for how much of your plan's survival depends on getting a reasonably favourable sequence of returns, versus how robust it actually is against a difficult one. This sits alongside the PortfolioCube Framework's own Retirement Corpus Required (RCR) and Total Future Liquid Asset (TFLA) terminology - see the methodology section further below for how this naming was arrived at, and what it is (and isn't) claimed to be exclusive to.
Reading the range of simulated outcomes: pessimistic, most likely, and optimistic scenarios
The result of 1,000 simulated futures isn't one line, it's a range - and this calculator shows that range as three bands tracking your projected corpus year by year through to your life expectancy: an optimistic scenario (the 90th percentile - only 10% of trials did better than this), a most likely or median scenario (the 50th percentile - the exact middle outcome across all 1,000 trials), and a pessimistic scenario (the 10th percentile - 90% of trials did better than this). Reading the gap between the pessimistic and median lines is often more informative than the Success Rate alone: a wide gap means your plan's outcome is genuinely sensitive to the sequence of returns you happen to get, while a narrow one means your plan holds up reasonably well even under a below-average sequence - either way, this is the picture a single-number retirement projection cannot show.
Common retirement planning mistakes in India
The most frequent gaps this calculator is specifically built to surface: assuming a single, blended return rate across genuinely different asset classes; underestimating retirement duration by planning off birth-year life expectancy rather than remaining life expectancy at actual retirement age; applying one inflation rate to both everyday lifestyle expenses and the faster-rising cost of healthcare; treating "reaching the target corpus" as the finish line, without checking whether that corpus is actually large enough to sustain the withdrawal rate needed for the rest of a multi-decade retirement; and relying on a single, average-return projection that hides Sequence of Return Risk entirely, rather than stress-testing the plan against a genuine range of possible return sequences.
How to use this calculator
Start with your current monthly expense, current age, planned retirement age, and expected life expectancy in the Goal Basics section. Set your inflation and return assumptions - separately for the years before and after retirement - since these two periods genuinely call for different assumptions. Enter what you already hold across equity, EPF, NPS, fixed deposits, and any other assets, along with your current monthly SIP. The Retirement Readiness Score, the Retirement Corpus Required, your Total Future Liquid Asset, the Annual Safe Withdrawable Rate, and the full corpus trajectory all update immediately as you adjust any input. For a deeper stress-test, set your expected post-retirement return volatility and review the Monte Carlo Success Rate along with the pessimistic, median, and optimistic corpus bands - use all of this to test different scenarios (a later retirement age, a higher SIP, a different asset mix, a more conservative volatility assumption) and see the actual, numerical effect of each before committing to a plan.
