The ten UK pension calculators actually worth using

Ian Shadrack's UK Retirement Planning Spreadsheet

The capability champion. Because it is a spreadsheet, every cell is visible and every assumption is editable. Couples, IHT with RNRB, full PCLS control, life events, SIPP/ISA/LISA/GIA, rental, annuities, triple-lock, drawdown sequencing, and detailed later-life spending — all present. Widely used and widely recommended in the UK FIRE community for over a decade.

The honest weakness is the user experience. There is no scenario comparison without manual sheet duplication, no visualisation beyond what you build yourself, and a meaningful learning curve before you trust the outputs. You also have to maintain it as tax rules change, though Shadrack publishes updates.

FIRElogic

Professional-grade UK retirement planning made simple, private and trustworthy. The pitch is unusual in this market: combine the calculation depth that until recently only adviser tools or Shadrack's spreadsheet offered, with an interface a non-specialist can actually use — clear, intuitive graphs and projections rather than a wall of cells or a multi-screen interrogation. The result is a tool that serves both ends of the audience: powerful enough for FIRE planners and advanced users running detailed tax-band optimisation, simple enough for those who are less financially confident and just want a clear answer to "when can I retire?" and "how much can I spend?"

The engine is designed for transparency and calculation integrity — published assumptions, visible tax workings, and outputs users can interrogate — but it is a young product, and a closed-source SaaS engine cannot match the cell-by-cell visibility of a spreadsheet like Shadrack's or the years of community validation behind RetireEasy and Guiide. We've scored it partial on "trusted engine" for that reason. The architecture is private by design: data stays under the user's control, with no third-party access. There is no cross-selling, no upsells to paid products, and no referrals to advisers or platforms. That is a deliberate position: FIRElogic is sold as software, not as a lead-generation channel into a regulated advice business, which is a meaningful distinction in a category dominated by provider-funded calculators. For the roughly 80% of UK workers with limited or no annual access to financial advice, this kind of tool is one of the few realistic routes to making informed retirement decisions.

Beyond the positioning, the product is built for real UK lives. Couples are modelled as first-class entities — two partners with their own ages, retirement dates, pensions, ISAs, incomes and drawdown profiles combined into a household projection — which is a rare capability in the consumer category. Solo users are equally well served. SIPP, ISA, GIA, DB pensions, annuities, rental income and NS&I Premium Bonds are all modelled as first-class UK assets; distinctive features include configurable SIPP band-filling (drawing to the basic-rate ceiling and recycling into ISA), tax-aware withdrawal sequencing, IHT projection with the residence nil-rate band taper, later-life spending changes and an integrated budget planner. For DIY investors trying to avoid ongoing IFA fees without sacrificing rigour, the combination of breadth, tax accuracy and ease of use is the substantive case for it.

ProjectionLab

The consumer planner most widely held up as the gold standard, and on the new criteria it earns the position. The interface is the best in the category — powerful and accessible at the same time — and the engine is well-regarded, transparent in its assumptions, and built to support sophisticated scenario design, life-event modelling and couples planning. There is no cross-selling, no adviser referral funnel, and the product is sold straightforwardly as software. It serves both ends of the user spectrum: enough depth for serious FIRE planning, enough clarity for users who just want to know whether they're on track.

The real caveat for UK users is the US-first tax model. Account types are 401(k), Roth IRA and taxable brokerage; the tax engine runs US federal and state brackets; there is no native concept of an ISA, LISA, SIPP, PCLS, MPAA, tapered annual allowance or UK income tax bands. UK users typically work around this by mapping ISA to Roth IRA and SIPP to Traditional 401(k). The approximation is closer than nothing, but it will not give you accurate UK tax outcomes — which is why we mark it partial on "broad accessibility" for a UK audience. For users prepared to manage that gap, the quality of the tool elsewhere is high enough to justify the rank.

RetireEasy

The longest-established consumer subscription planner in the UK. Couples, IHT, life events, all major wrapper types, rental income, annuities and Monte Carlo sustainability testing are all supported. Triple-locked State Pension is handled. The drawdown engine works but offers a single deterministic withdrawal pattern rather than configurable strategy comparison; the PCLS implementation has been criticised on forums as opaque, with the tool tracking surpluses in a hidden account users find unintuitive. Rental is modelled at the income level rather than as a full property asset with growth, tax and sale.

The interface shows its age and the development pace appears slower than newer entrants. That said, it does the core job and has years of UK user feedback behind its assumptions, which is not nothing.

Guiide

The strongest free UK consumer tool, by a margin. Its standout feature is tax-aware drawdown guidance — it suggests an efficient order to draw from SIPP and GIA based on UK tax sequencing logic. This is heuristic optimisation rather than full configurable strategy modelling (no Guyton-Klinger guardrails, no strategy comparison), but for most users the guidance is more useful than the manual configuration paid tools require. PCLS, SIPPs, annuities and triple-lock are covered. The tool is single-person only — there is no household or couples view — ISAs are not modelled as a wrapper, life events are not supported, and IHT and rental income are not first-class.

For a free tool with no signup friction, the gap to paid alternatives is genuinely small for users with a straightforward UK pension/State Pension setup. If you have an ISA pot, a partner's finances to model, or any one-off life event, you'll need to look elsewhere.

UK FIRE Calculator

A focused free tool for working out your FIRE number — the pot size needed for financial independence — using UK wrappers and 2026/27 tax rates. Models DC pensions, ISAs, LISAs, GIA and the State Pension correctly. Couples coverage is limited, IHT is not modelled, rental income is not supported, and life-event modelling is sparse. Drawdown handling is basic.

Within its narrower remit, it does the job well. Use it alongside Guiide rather than instead of.

cFIREsim

A historical-data backtester that runs your retirement plan against every starting year in over a century of market data, returning a success rate. It is US-built and has no concept of UK wrappers or UK tax, so it cannot be used as a primary planner. What it can do is provide an independent stress-test of withdrawal sustainability — a useful second opinion once you've built your plan in a UK-native tool.

Treat it as a sanity check on your safe withdrawal rate, not as a planner.

MoneyHelper Pension Calculator

The official tool from MoneyHelper (the consumer guidance arm of the Money and Pensions Service). Single-person, single-pot, basic projection from contributions, salary and growth assumptions, with State Pension included. No couples, no IHT, no rental, no drawdown sequencing, no life events.

Its value is not feature depth — it is impartiality. As a government-backed tool with no commercial interest in the answer, it is the right reference point for sanity-checking other tools' projections. Use it to triangulate, not to plan.

MyFinanceFuture

A free UK retirement tool that on paper covers more ground than the typical provider calculator — it attempts couples, multiple wrappers and a degree of drawdown modelling. In practice it is extremely cumbersome and unintuitive to use. Inputs are spread across a long sequence of screens with limited ability to navigate freely between them, the data model is opaque, error messages are unhelpful, and small changes often require re-entering information that should have been retained. Users repeatedly report abandoning the tool partway through.

The underlying calculations may well be reasonable, but a planning tool that most users cannot finish a session in is not, in practice, a planning tool. It is included here because it is genuinely free and does attempt the harder modelling problems — but the workflow makes it hard to recommend over Guiide for free users, or any of the paid options for serious planners.

Hargreaves Lansdown Pension & Drawdown Calculators

HL publishes two separate tools — a pension projection calculator and a drawdown sustainability calculator — that together cover slightly more ground than the typical provider widget. The drawdown calculator in particular models life expectancy and growth-rate sensitivity in a more useful way than most. They remain single-person, single-pot tools with no IHT, no rental and no proper sequencing across multiple wrappers, but as free quick-projection tools from the largest UK SIPP platform they are the best of the provider category.

Useful for HL customers checking whether their pot is on track. Not a substitute for an actual planning tool.

Other provider calculators (Aviva, Standard Life, Vanguard, et al)

The pension calculators offered by Aviva, Standard Life, Royal London, Scottish Widows, Legal & General, Aegon, AJ Bell, Fidelity, Vanguard, interactive investor, PensionBee, Nutmeg and Wealthify all sit in similar territory — single-person, single-pot, contribution-and-growth projections with basic State Pension assumptions. They exist primarily as marketing and lead-generation assets rather than as planning tools.

We list them as a category because differentiating between them on capability is largely beside the point. They share the same core limitations: no couples, no multiple wrappers, no IHT, no life events, no rental, no drawdown sequencing.