Retirement Calculator — Calculate Retirement Corpus & Monthly SIP Needed | AliGreat.com

Free Retirement Calculator for India — find the retirement corpus you need and the monthly SIP required to reach it, adjusted for inflation.

Most Indians know they should be saving for retirement, but far fewer have actually worked out a concrete number — how much corpus will genuinely be needed, and how much needs to be invested every month starting today to get there. The gap between “I should save more” and an actual target number is exactly where the Retirement Calculator on AliGreat.com steps in, building inflation, investment returns, and life expectancy directly into a single, complete projection.

What does the Retirement Calculator do?

Enter your current age, planned retirement age, current monthly expenses, expected inflation rate, expected investment return while you’re still working, expected return on your corpus after retirement, the age you want to plan your money lasting until, and any amount you’ve already saved toward retirement. The calculator shows the total corpus you’ll need at retirement, the monthly SIP required to close the gap between what you have and what you need, your projected yearly expenses at the point of retirement (after inflation), and the shortfall remaining after accounting for your existing savings.

The formula behind it

This calculator combines several of the formulas used elsewhere on AliGreat.com into a single, complete retirement projection, working through the problem in stages:

Stage 1 — Inflate today’s expenses to the retirement date: Expense at retirement = Current monthly expense × 12 × (1 + inflation)^(years to retirement)

Stage 2 — Calculate the corpus needed to fund retirement-year expenses for the remaining life expectancy, using a real rate of return (the post-retirement return adjusted for ongoing inflation during retirement) applied as a growing annuity calculation, since your expenses will keep rising with inflation even during retirement itself.

Stage 3 — Subtract the future value of your existing savings (grown forward at your working-years return rate) from the total corpus needed, to find the remaining gap.

Stage 4 — Solve for the monthly SIP required to close that gap by retirement, using the standard SIP future-value formula in reverse.

A worked example

Suppose you’re currently 30 years old, plan to retire at 60, currently spend ₹50,000 a month, expect 6% inflation, expect a 12% return while working, expect a 7% return during retirement, want your money to last until age 85, and already have ₹5,00,000 saved toward retirement.

• Years to retirement = 30
• Years in retirement = 25
• Monthly expense at retirement (after 30 years of 6% inflation) ≈ ₹2,87,000, or roughly ₹34,44,000 annually
• Corpus needed at retirement (to fund this rising annual expense for 25 years at a 7% post-retirement return against continuing 6% inflation) ≈ ₹7.2 crore
• Future value of existing ₹5,00,000 savings after 30 years at 12% ≈ ₹1.5 crore
• Remaining gap ≈ ₹5.7 crore
• Monthly SIP required to close this gap over 30 years at 12% ≈ ₹47,500 per month

This example illustrates why retirement corpus targets in India, when properly inflation-adjusted over a multi-decade horizon, routinely run into several crores of rupees — a figure that can feel alarming at first glance, but is a direct, mathematically necessary consequence of maintaining today’s real lifestyle 30 years into an inflationary future, not a sign of unusually extravagant planning.

Why most people significantly under-save for retirement

A common and understandable mistake is planning for retirement purely in today’s rupee terms — assuming that if ₹50,000 a month covers your needs comfortably today, a corpus that generates ₹50,000 a month in retirement will be sufficient. This completely ignores that prices will have risen substantially by the time you actually retire, and will continue rising throughout your retirement years as well. Many people also lean heavily on EPF (Employee Provident Fund) accumulation as their primary retirement vehicle, assuming it will be “enough,” without ever actually running the specific numbers against their real expected future lifestyle and its inflated cost — this calculator is designed specifically to close that particular gap in most people’s retirement planning.

Why the corpus needed is a “growing annuity,” not a simple lump sum

Unlike a simple withdrawal calculation, retirement corpus planning has to account for the fact that your expenses will keep rising with inflation even after you’ve retired and are actively drawing down the corpus — a retiree spending ₹34 lakh in their first retirement year will need meaningfully more than that in year 15 of retirement, purely due to ongoing inflation during the retirement years themselves. This is why the underlying calculation uses a “real rate of return” — essentially your post-retirement investment return adjusted for continuing inflation — rather than simply dividing the annual expense by the number of retirement years, since that simpler approach would badly understate the true corpus needed for a retirement that could last 20-30 years.

The three levers you actually control

Looking at the formula’s inputs, there are really only a few levers genuinely within your control: how much you’re currently saving and investing (which determines your existing base), your monthly SIP amount going forward, and to a lesser extent your retirement age and expected investment returns (which carry their own risk trade-offs). Inflation and life expectancy are largely outside your control and should be treated as reasonably conservative planning assumptions rather than variables to optimise. Running this calculator with a few different monthly SIP amounts, retirement ages, or return assumptions can help you see clearly which specific lever moves your outcome the most for your particular situation — for many people, delaying retirement by even 2-3 years, or increasing the monthly SIP moderately, closes a surprisingly large portion of an otherwise intimidating retirement gap.

Sequence-of-returns risk in retirement

Just as with AliGreat.com’s SWP Calculator, retirement corpus planning carries sequence-of-returns risk — if markets perform poorly in the early years right after you retire, your corpus can be permanently damaged in a way that a simple average-return assumption doesn’t capture, since you’re simultaneously drawing down the corpus while it’s recovering from a downturn. This is part of why many retirement plans recommend a more conservative asset allocation (a higher proportion in debt and fixed income relative to equity) as retirement approaches and during the retirement years themselves, even though this typically means accepting a somewhat lower expected long-term return in exchange for reduced volatility at the specific point in time when volatility can do the most lasting damage.

Healthcare costs — a category worth planning for separately

Healthcare expenses in India have historically risen faster than general inflation, and healthcare needs (and costs) also tend to increase specifically with age, independent of general inflation trends. If your current monthly expense figure doesn’t already include a realistic allowance for rising healthcare costs in later life, it’s worth either increasing your inflation assumption specifically for this calculation, or separately budgeting an additional healthcare-specific corpus (potentially through a dedicated health insurance and top-up cover strategy) on top of the general retirement corpus this calculator projects.

Adjusting the plan as circumstances change

A retirement plan built at age 30 should genuinely be revisited periodically — every few years, or whenever a significant life change occurs (a salary jump, a new financial goal, a change in expected retirement age) — rather than treated as a fixed, one-time calculation. Re-running this calculator periodically with updated current age, current expenses, and current savings gives you an updated, more accurate monthly SIP target, since small early adjustments compound into meaningfully different long-term outcomes compared to discovering a large shortfall only a few years before actual retirement.

Retirement corpus and NPS or PPF

The monthly SIP figure this calculator produces represents your total required retirement savings rate, which can be split across multiple instruments — a portion into PPF for its guaranteed, tax-free component, a portion into NPS for its additional tax deduction and mandatory annuity structure, and a portion into equity mutual fund SIPs for higher growth potential. AliGreat.com’s dedicated PPF and NPS calculators can help you see how much of this total required monthly commitment each specific instrument could realistically cover, based on their respective statutory contribution limits and expected returns.

Who should use this calculator

Anyone in their working years, from their twenties through their fifties, who wants to move from a vague sense that they “should save more” to a concrete, specific monthly SIP target for retirement will find this calculator directly useful. It’s equally valuable for people already contributing to retirement savings who want to check whether their current monthly contribution is actually on track to meet a realistically inflation-adjusted future need, rather than an outdated, un-inflated target set years earlier.

Frequently asked questions

Why is my calculated retirement corpus so much larger than I expected? This is almost always because the calculation properly accounts for 20-30+ years of inflation both before and during retirement — a target that looks alarmingly large in today’s rupee terms is a mathematically accurate reflection of what maintaining today’s real lifestyle will genuinely require decades from now.

Should I use a higher or lower inflation assumption for retirement planning? Most planners suggest 6% as a reasonably conservative general assumption, though using a higher figure (7-8%) provides an extra safety margin, particularly given that healthcare costs — a significant retirement expense category — have historically risen faster than general inflation.

Does this calculator account for EPF and other existing retirement savings? Yes, indirectly — enter your current total retirement-directed savings (including EPF, existing mutual funds, PPF balance, and so on) in the “already saved” field, and the calculator will factor its projected future growth into reducing your remaining monthly SIP requirement.

How often should I re-run this retirement calculation? Every 2-3 years, or whenever a significant change occurs — a salary increase, a change in planned retirement age, or a meaningful shift in your current expenses — to keep your monthly SIP target realistically aligned with your actual, current circumstances.

Try it now

Open the Retirement Calculator on AliGreat.com, enter your numbers, and see your real, inflation-adjusted retirement corpus target and required monthly SIP — free, instant, and fully transparent about every assumption used.