What is my FIRE number, and when do I get there?

The number is one division. Take what a year costs you, divide by the share of the portfolio you plan to withdraw in the first year, and that is the balance the plan needs: $60,000 divided by 4% is $1,500,000. Turn the division around and it reads as a multiple: a 4% rate is 25 years of spending, a 3% rate is 33.33 years, a 5% rate is 20 years. Same life, three different piles.

Everything here is in today's dollars. The return field is a real return, growth after inflation, which is why the target does not need an inflation forecast bolted on: if you can spend $60,000 on today's prices, the number funds that same basket. It also means the figure will look small next to the nominal balances an ordinary growth calculator prints. If you want the nominal view of the same saving, the compound interest calculator runs $100,000 plus $3,000 a month at a rate you pick and shows the contribution and growth split in future dollars.

Of the $1,500,000 on these inputs, $100,000 is already invested, $725,716 is money you have not saved yet, and $674,284 is growth on the way. That last share is the one that grows as the horizon lengthens, and it is the whole reason the first decade of saving is worth more than the last one.

Every other input on this page is a fact about you. The withdrawal rate is a judgment about the future, and it is doing most of the work. Move it half a point and the target moves by more than a year of spending. Here is the same $60,000 at four rates, with the wait each one implies from $100,000 invested and $3,000 a month.

Read the leverage rather than the rows. At 3% the number is $2,000,000 against $1,500,000 at 4%: a third larger, for identical spending. The extra $500,000 is not a better retirement, it is margin, and on these inputs it costs 4.1 years of extra saving to buy. Going the other way, 5% cuts the number to $1,200,000 and the wait to 17.2 years, and what you have bought with those 2.9 years is a higher chance of running the portfolio down.

A lower rate means a bigger number, more years of work, and more room for a bad decade early. A higher rate means a smaller number, an earlier date, and less room. That is the entire trade, and it is yours. This calculator ships 4% as a starting value because that is the convention the literature settled on, not because anything here establishes that 4% is safe.

The convention traces to two places: William P. Bengen's 1994 article in the Journal of Financial Planning, which first ran withdrawal rates against historical returns rather than averages, and the 1998 AAII Journal study by Philip L. Cooley, Carl M. Hubbard and Daniel T. Walz of Trinity University, which is the one this page cites because its full text is public. The table below is its Table 3: the share of 1926 to 1995 historical windows in which an inflation-adjusted withdrawal lasted the full 30 years, by portfolio mix and rate.

Four things about that table matter more than the headline cell. It is a 30 year test, the longest period the study ran, so it says nothing about someone stopping at 52 and needing forty. It is a count of overlapping historical windows in one country over one seventy year stretch, not a probability. It makes no adjustment for taxes or transaction costs, which come straight out of the spending the withdrawal is meant to fund. And the mix matters as much as the rate: at 4% the 75% stocks, 25% bonds portfolio lasted in 98% of windows while an all-bond portfolio lasted in 20%.

So the honest reading is narrow. Withdrawal rates in the 3% to 4% band held up across this test for stock-heavy portfolios over thirty years. At 7% the best row in the table, all stocks, lasted in 59% of windows and the 75% stocks, 25% bonds mix in 49%, nearer a coin flip than a plan, and the study's own conclusion is that every rate above 7% performed poorly over every payout period it ran. Between those two statements sits a judgment the arithmetic cannot make for you, which is why the rate on this page is a field rather than a constant.

The second answer this page gives is the wait. From $100,000 invested and $3,000 a month at a 5% real return, $1,500,000 arrives in 20.2 years, at age 52.2. Strip out growth entirely and the same saving takes 38.9 years; stop saving and let the balance compound alone and it takes 55.5 years. Neither extreme is the plan, and the gap between them is why both fields matter.

Extra saving is priceable. On these inputs another $500 a month takes 1.7 years off the wait, landing at 18.4 years. Doubling the monthly amount to $6,000 lands at 13.1 years. Cutting the spending target in half, to $30,000 a year, lands at 11.8 years, because spending sits on both sides of the problem: it lowers the number and raises what is left to save.

That double effect is why savings rate, not salary, sets the date. If you save a share of take home pay, pay cancels out of the algebra exactly: the target is the unsaved share times the multiple, and the contribution is the saved share, so the ratio between them depends only on the share. Starting from nothing, at a 5% real return and a 4% withdrawal rate:

Every row assumes a zero starting balance, so your own answer is earlier than the row you sit on. If you are trying to work out what that share can realistically be, the net worth calculator establishes the balance side and the savings goal calculator works backward from a target and a date to the monthly amount it needs. For the ordinary version of this question, an employer plan and a normal retirement age rather than an early exit, the retirement calculator is the better instrument.

Health insurance before Medicare. Medicare.gov states that Medicare is health insurance for people 65 or older who meet citizenship or residency requirements. On these inputs you reach the number at 52.2, which leaves 12.8 years to cover yourself. The premium, the deductible, and the subsidy you may or may not qualify for depend on where you live and what your reported income is, and none of it is modeled here. The only correct fix is to put your own estimate into the annual spending field, which raises the number by that amount times 25.

The order returns arrive in. This model applies the same real return every month. Real markets do not, and for a portfolio being drawn down the order matters enormously: a bad first five years sells shares cheap to fund spending, and the recovery arrives at a smaller balance. Two retirements with identical average returns can end very differently. That is sequence risk, it is the main reason withdrawal rates are studied against historical windows rather than averages, and a deterministic calculator cannot show it to you.

Taxes. Nothing here is after tax. Where the money sits decides what a $60,000 withdrawal actually costs to produce: a taxable brokerage account realizes gains, a traditional 401k or IRA withdrawal is ordinary income, and a Roth balance generally is not. The Trinity study made no tax adjustment either, so its success rates and this arithmetic share the same gap. If your spending number is what you need in hand, the balance that produces it is larger than the number above.

Spending is not a constant. The whole model assumes you spend the same real amount every year for the rest of your life. Actual retirement spending tends to move: higher early while people travel, lower in the middle, higher again late for care. A mortgage ends. A child finishes school. Long term care may not be covered. Treating one flat number as the truth for forty years is the modeling choice this page makes for tractability, and it is the assumption most likely to be wrong for you.

This calculator is built to be used without a browser. Every input is a query parameter on this page, and the same parameters on the JSON twin return the complete answer as a document.

GET /tools/fire-number.json?spending=48000&swr=3.5&balance=250000&saving=4000

The response carries inputs after parsing and clamping, result with the target and the years of spending it represents, the months and years to reach it from today's balance, the age that lands on and the years left before Medicare, the split between balance, future contributions and growth, a ladder of four withdrawal rates with the cited study's 30 year success rate for each rate it tested, savingsRateRows of years from zero by savings rate, and a year by year yearly schedule, drivers ranked by effect with a plain sentence each, assumptions that say for every field whether you supplied it and name the source when the default came from one, sources with a URL and an as-of date for each source the tool cites, which is an empty list on the calculators whose every default is an example input rather than a published figure, warnings, a disclaimer, and in tool the canonicalUrl and jsonUrl that carry only your non-default parameters. The canonical URL is the answer's permanent address; use it when you cite the number.

Parameters, all optional, in any order:

• spending ($ per year), default $60,000 per year.
• swr (%), default 4%, from Cooley, Hubbard and Walz, AAII Journal, February 1998.
• balance ($), default $100,000.
• saving ($ per month), default $3,000 per month.
• rate (%), default 5%.
• step ($ per month), default $500 per month.
• age (count), default 32.

Values accept plain numbers and loose human formats such as 100k, $100,000, or 6.5%. Unknown parameters are ignored, values outside a field's range are clamped and reported in warnings, and the endpoint never fails on bad input. Responses are cacheable for a day; the defaults change when their sources publish, and tool.version changes when the method does.

• Cooley, Hubbard and Walz, AAII Journal, February 1998, as of 1998-02-01. The Trinity study, "Retirement Savings: Choosing a Withdrawal Rate That Is Sustainable". Three finance professors at Trinity University ran withdrawal rates of 3% to 12% against 1926 to 1995 returns for payout periods of 15, 20, 25 and 30 years and five stock and bond mixes, and reported the share of historical windows in which the money lasted. TRINITY_30Y on this page is its Table 3, inflation-adjusted, 30 year row. The study makes no adjustment for taxes or transaction costs, and a success rate is a count of past windows, not a probability for yours.
• Medicare.gov, Get started with Medicare, as of 2026-08-22. Medicare.gov states that "Medicare is health insurance for people 65 or older who meet citizenship or residency requirements." That age is where this page closes the healthcare gap it reports; it does not price the years before it.

The withdrawal-rate figures on this page are Table 3 of the 1998 AAII Journal study, transcribed into the engine as TRINITY_30Y and rendered from there, so the table you read is the data the warnings quote. Bengen's 1994 article is named above as the origin of the convention and no figure is quoted from it, because this page could not verify a public copy of the original. Everything else here, the target, the ladder, the years, and the savings-rate table, is arithmetic on the inputs you supply, and the defaults for spending, balance, saving, return, and age are example inputs rather than statistics.

Carlo is a personal finance agent. It knows your accounts, debts, and goals, so instead of an example household at an assumed real return it can see what you actually spend, what you are actually putting away each month, and what that makes your number and your date. Text it the question.

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