💧Safe Withdrawal Rate Calculator
Estimate how much sustainable annual and monthly income your portfolio can generate at different withdrawal rates.
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Income at Different Withdrawal Rates
What Is Safe Withdrawal Rate?
A safe withdrawal rate is the percentage of your portfolio you can spend each year in retirement with a high probability of never running out of money, even accounting for market downturns, sequencing risk, and a multi-decade time horizon.
It's the inverse problem of the FIRE number: instead of asking "how much do I need," it asks "given what I have, how much can I actually spend?"
How This Calculator Works
This calculator simply applies a withdrawal percentage to a portfolio value to show annual and monthly income, and lays out how that income changes across a range of withdrawal rates so you can see the tradeoff directly.
Psychological Considerations
The number on the screen is calm. Living off it during an actual market downturn often isn't. The single biggest threat to a withdrawal plan isn't usually the math — it's panic-selling into a 30% drawdown in year two of retirement, locking in losses that a static spreadsheet never modeled.
Before you retire, it's worth honestly rehearsing this: if your portfolio dropped 25% in your first year of withdrawals, would you stick to the plan, or would you act on fear? People who've never actually lived through a downturn while depending on their portfolio for income tend to underestimate how differently it feels in practice versus theory.
Frequently Asked Questions
Because "safe" depends on time horizon, market conditions at retirement, flexibility to cut spending in bad years, and how much risk of running short you're willing to accept. 4% is a commonly cited historical benchmark for a 30-year horizon, not a guarantee.
Many retirees use a fixed real (inflation-adjusted) withdrawal, but increasingly popular alternatives — like reducing withdrawals after a down market year — improve the odds of not running out, at the cost of some income flexibility.
No — it shows gross portfolio income. Taxes depend on account type (taxable, traditional, Roth) and your tax situation, so actual spendable income will usually be lower than the figure shown.