Most UK retirement planning can be done free. This sets out what paid tools add that free ones do not, who genuinely needs it, and which free options are worth your time first.
A declaration before anything else: this site is published by the company behind FIRElogic, which is a paid retirement planner and is reviewed on our main page. So take the framing here for what it is — but note that the useful version of this page is one that helps you avoid paying if you do not need to, and that is what follows.
The short answer is that free tools are sufficient for most people, and the specific circumstances where paying earns its money are narrower than the software industry implies.
Before paying for anything, three free things are worth doing, in sequence. They cost nothing, and the first two matter more than any software you could buy.
On GOV.UK, for you and your partner if you have one. This is the single highest-value thing on the list. The State Pension is guaranteed, triple-locked, inflation-resistant income, and for a couple it arrives twice. A gap in either National Insurance record changes your plan more than any modelling refinement, and it may be possible to fill. Nothing you pay for can substitute for knowing this number.
Government-backed, free, no sign-up, and quite adequate for the basic question of whether you are broadly on track. If it tells you that you are a long way off, that is the finding — and no paid tool will tell you differently.
Honestly the best way to understand your own plan, because you see every assumption. You will learn more from an afternoon doing this than from any dashboard. Its weakness is UK tax, which we cover in detail on our retirement spreadsheets page.
If those three leave you with a clear answer, you are done. Plenty of people are.
Paid retirement planners are not better at projecting investment growth — that arithmetic is identical everywhere and no one has a proprietary advantage in multiplying by 1.05. What you are buying falls into four categories.
The valuable, unglamorous one. Working out what to withdraw to achieve a target net income requires solving backwards through bands and allowances, and the answer changes when thresholds do. Paying means someone else keeps that current instead of you noticing a Budget changed your model.
With a pension, an ISA and taxable savings, the order you spend them in changes your lifetime tax bill, sometimes substantially. Working out the best order across a whole plan is a search problem rather than a formula. Free tools essentially never attempt it; it is one of the clearer justifications for paying.
Two people each have their own allowance and bands, so a couple keeps more of the same household income than one person drawing it alone. Doing this properly means modelling both people and coordinating between them. Most free calculators model one person and let you guess at the rest.
A retirement plan is not a one-off calculation — it wants revisiting annually as markets, rules and intentions move. The recurring value of a paid tool is largely that your inputs are still there next year and the tax logic has been updated without you.
Worth being blunt, because this is where money gets wasted:
Every tool, free or paid, is running assumptions you supplied or it invented. A confident-looking chart is not a forecast. Precision in the interface is not accuracy about 2050.
Software is not regulated financial advice and cannot tell you what to do given your circumstances. If you need that, you need a regulated adviser, and no subscription substitutes.
The output is only as good as the growth rate and life expectancy you fed it. Paying does not resolve that uncertainty — at best it stops you being wrong about the tax on top of it.
You are one person with one pension, retiring at or near State Pension age, aiming for a flat income. There is little tax complexity to get wrong and a short bridge to fund. Use MoneyHelper, check your forecast, build a spreadsheet, stop.
You are planning as a couple; you are retiring years before State Pension age and must fund a long bridge from your own pots; you hold several wrappers and want the drawdown order optimised rather than guessed; or you intend to revisit the plan every year and would rather not maintain the tax logic yourself.
The honest answer is that you do not have enough saved. A tool will simply confirm that with more decimal places, because the binding constraint is the size of the pot rather than the quality of the projection. Better modelling does not change that arithmetic, and no calculator will find money that is not there.
Our full review of ten UK pension calculators scores free and paid tools against identical criteria, including our own, and says which free options we would use first.
Yes. MoneyHelper's pension calculator is government-backed, free and requires no account, and is adequate for checking whether you are broadly on track. Several other free calculators handle a single pot competently. The common limitation across all of them is UK tax: they either apply an average rate or ignore drawdown order, both of which flatter early-retirement plans.
Get your State Pension forecast, and your partner's if you have one. It is free, takes minutes, and is guaranteed inflation-linked income that anchors the whole plan. A gap in either record will change your numbers more than any software will, and you may be able to fill it. Do this first regardless of what you decide about tools.
More accurate on tax, usually — that is the part with real rules to get right, and it is maintained for you. Not more accurate about the future: every tool is projecting from assumptions you or it chose, and no software has any special insight into future returns or your lifespan. Be wary of treating a detailed chart as a forecast.
It depends on whether you will actually revisit the plan. A retirement plan is worth re-running annually as markets and rules move, and the recurring cost buys maintained tax logic and your saved inputs. If you intend to model once and act on it, a one-off tool or a spreadsheet is better value.
Reasonable question. Judge it on whether the advice is useful to someone who decides not to pay: the page tells you to get your State Pension forecast first, names a free government calculator, recommends building your own spreadsheet, and says plainly that if you have not saved enough, software will not help. Our main review also applies identical scoring criteria to our own product as to competitors, and discloses the relationship on every page.