How Long Will Your Savings Last in Retirement? (Table)

How long your savings last in retirement is set by the share you withdraw each year and the return you earn after inflation, and the answer is the same for any balance. Withdraw 4% a year (raised with inflation) at a 3% real return and the money lasts about 44 years; withdraw 5% and it lasts about 30 years, 6% about 22. If the real return is a bit higher than your withdrawal rate, it doesn't run out on average.

Those figures assume the same return every year, no tax and no fund fees. With the same average return, a sequence with two bad years first lasted 21.5 years and one with them twenty years in lasted 37.9 years.

The table: years until your savings run out

Each cell is the number of years until the balance reaches zero. The withdrawal is a share of the starting balance in year one, raised with inflation every year after (so it stays constant in inflation-adjusted terms) and taken at the start of each year; the return is after inflation and identical every year; no taxes, fees, pensions or spending changes. Each cell is computed from the NPER formula and matches a year-by-year loop.

Years until zero. Source: own calculation, start-of-year withdrawals, constant real return.

To find your row, divide what you'll take out in the first year by what you have: $36,000 from $900,000 is 4%. For the column, in Aswath Damodaran's NYU Stern return dataset, 3-month US Treasury bills returned 0.33% a year after inflation from 1928 to 2025, so cash sits in the 0% column. A 60/40 mix of US stocks and Treasury bonds, rebalanced yearly, returned 5.15% real over the same 98 years and the S&P 500 6.78%, so both sit at or above the 5% column (geometric means calculated from the histretSP spreadsheet). A fund fee of 0.5% to 1% a year shifts you half a column to a full column to the left.

The 4% row traces back to William Bengen's 1994 study, which ran retirements starting in every year from 1926, with the first withdrawal set as a percentage of the balance and then adjusted for inflation, and judged them against a 30-year minimum. He recommended no more than 4% in the early years with 50% to 75% in stocks, called 5% risky and anything from 6% up a gamble. The Trinity study from 1998 found that, after inflation, 3% to 4% kept succeeding for stock-dominated portfolios. The table's 44.1 years at 3% real sits well above their 30-year bar because it shows the average path, while those studies had to survive the worst historical ones. The safe withdrawal rate guide covers choosing a rate, and the 4% row is also where the 25x target in how to calculate your FIRE number comes from.

To run your own numbers, the free how-long-will-my-money-last calculator takes your savings, your monthly spending and an expected return after inflation, then charts the balance year by year next to a 4% rule line. It asks for spending and shows the withdrawal rate as a result, with presets at 3%, 5% and 7% real. It also takes each withdrawal monthly, at the end of the month after that month's growth, so its answers run slightly longer than this table: 23.0 years instead of 22.5 for 6% at 3% real.

Why your balance doesn't change the answer

$400,000 with $20,000 a year of spending and $1,000,000 with $50,000 a year both withdraw 5%, and at a 3% real return both last 29.6 years. Double the balance and double the spending and every line of the year-by-year path doubles too, so the year it hits zero stays put. A $500,000 or a $2 million balance gives the same answer once you divide the yearly withdrawal by it. The guide to how much money you need to retire runs the same maths backwards to size the balance for a given level of spending.

A worked example: $500,000 and $30,000 a year

$30,000 out of $500,000 is a 6% withdrawal. At a 3% real return the balance falls to $450,855 after three years, $317,724 after ten and $72,761 after twenty. At the start of year 23 the last $14,465 covers about half a year's spending, so the money lasts 22.5 years. In a spreadsheet, =NPER(0.03,-30000,500000,0,1) returns 22.48.

At $25,000 a year (5%), the same $500,000 lasts 29.6 years, 7.1 years longer than at $30,000.

$500,000 start, 3% real return, start-of-year withdrawals, inflation-adjusted. Source: own calculation.

Data: own calculation; $500,000 start, 3% real return, $30,000 vs $25,000 a year withdrawn at the start of each year, inflation-adjusted.

Taking the money monthly instead of once a year barely moves the result: 22.9 years with withdrawals at the start of each month and 23.0 at the end.

A 65-year-old American man has 16.95 more years on average and a woman 19.75, according to the SSA period life table; many live well past those averages, so the 30-year span Bengen tested is a sensible minimum from 65, and retiring at 50 means planning for 40 years or more.

How inflation changes the answer

A real return is what the investments earn minus what prices rise. The exact conversion is (1 + nominal return) ÷ (1 + inflation) − 1, so 6% nominal with 3% inflation is 2.91% real, slightly below the 3.0% that plain subtraction gives. US consumer prices rose 3.7% in the 12 months to September 2026 according to the BLS CPI release, and averaged 3.04% a year from 1928 to 2025 in the Damodaran data.

Leaving inflation out entirely, with a 6% return and withdrawals that never rise, more than doubles the answer at 6% and makes 4% and 5% look permanent.

Start-of-year withdrawals. Source: own calculation.

At 3% inflation, $40,000 of spending today costs about $72,000 in twenty years (inflation explainer), and the withdrawals have to keep up with that. Raised each year, a 5% withdrawal at a 6% return lasts 29.1 years instead of never running out.

The formula (and the spreadsheet version)

With withdrawal rate w (as a decimal of the starting balance) and real return r, taken at the start of each year:

n = −ln(1 − r / (w × (1 + r))) / ln(1 + r)

When r is 0, n is 1 / w: 4% a year lasts 25 years.

In Excel, and in Google Sheets with the same arguments, use =NPER(r, -W, B, 0, 1), where W is the yearly withdrawal and B the balance. The final 1 tells NPER to treat payments as made at the beginning of the period; leave it out and you get the slightly longer end-of-year answer. A #NUM! error means the money never runs out.

The money never runs out when w is at or below r / (1 + r): 2.91% at a 3% real return, 3.85% at 4%, 4.76% at 5%. Withdrawing exactly the real return still empties the account eventually, because each withdrawal leaves before it earns that year's return: a 4% withdrawal at 4% real lasts 83.1 years, and 5% at 5% lasts 62.4.

Why the table is optimistic: bad first years

Take $1,000,000, withdraw $50,000 a year (5%), adjusted for inflation, and use 40 years of real returns: 38 years at +5% and two at −15%. The average is 4.0% either way, and an investor who withdrew nothing would end with exactly the same balance whichever order the crash came in.

$1,000,000 start, $50,000 a year withdrawn at the start of each year. Source: own calculation.

Data: own calculation; $1,000,000 start, $50,000 a year withdrawn at the start of each year, constant after inflation; same 40-year returns (+5% real, two years at -15%) in two orders.

The early crash ends 16.4 years sooner because the $100,000 withdrawn in years 1 and 2 comes out of a falling portfolio, which leaves less money to earn the +5% years that follow. Historical crashes went deeper than −15%: in the Damodaran data the S&P 500 lost 36.6% after inflation in 2008 and 38.1% in 1931, and in 2022 a 60/40 portfolio fell 22.9% real because stocks and bonds dropped together.

The calculator shows a rough-run and a good-run range around its main answer, but it can't script a crash in a specific year, and it says itself that it understates this risk. For the full mechanics and what retirees do about it, read the sequence of returns risk guide.

What makes savings last longer

At 3% real, cutting the withdrawal rate from 6% to 5% adds 7.1 years and from 5% to 4% another 14.5.

A 4% withdrawal lasts 25 years at the 0% real return of cash and 44.1 years at 3% real.

A pension, state pension or rent covering $10,000 of a $40,000 budget cuts the withdrawal from $800,000 from 5% to 3.75%, which at 3% real stretches 29.6 years to 50.7. A pension that starts later helps less, because the portfolio carries the full amount until it starts.

Cutting spending for a year or two after a crash means selling fewer shares at low prices, and those low-price sales are what shortened the early-crash scenario to 21.5 years.

To find your own percentage, add up a year of spending, subtract any pension or other income, and divide by what you have invested; the table row for that percentage gives the average-case years. Put the same numbers into the how-long-will-my-money-last calculator to see the age your money runs out at, the rough-run range and how your rate compares with the 4% rule.