Pension calculator 2026/27
What goes into your pension, what the tax relief on it is really worth, how much the law lets you pay in — and what the pot comes to, in today's money as well as in cash, with the tax on the way out.
Calculator
What goes in
Everything you have already built up in defined contribution pensions. A defined benefit (final salary) pension is not this, and is not modelled anywhere on this page.
Before any pension contribution comes out. This page treats it as your whole taxable income and as your relevant UK earnings — the figure that caps how much can be relieved. Other taxable income, such as rental profit, is not collected and would change both.
A year at a time, and gross — the amount that lands in the pension, not the amount that leaves your bank account. Under relief at source £80 paid in is £100 gross, so enter the £100.
Salary sacrifice is a third mechanism and a different calculation — it reduces your gross pay, so National Insurance falls too.
A year at a time. It lands in the pot and gets no relief through your tax return, because it was never your income — but it does count towards the annual allowance below.
0% keeps the contribution level in cash terms, which is a falling contribution in real terms. A percentage-of-salary contribution rises with pay, so set this to whatever you expect your pay to do.
£400 a month goes into the projection — £4,800 a year split into 12 equal instalments and rounded to the penny.
What it grows to
The term the arithmetic runs over. It is not an age and this page does not have one.
Your assumption, not a rate this page can look up. It is applied at exactly the same rate every period, which is not how returns arrive.
Charged on the value of the pot and deducted from it. A fund's own ongoing charge is taken inside the fund and is not this — model it by reducing the growth assumption above.
Growth and charges are applied on the same cycle, once per month. Contributions land at the end of each month.
Used only to restate the pot in today's money. It never changes the projection itself — the schedule stays in the pounds of the year each row falls in.
Adds a column. It deflates the finished schedule; it does not re-run it.
What comes out
A year at a time, before tax, after the tax-free cash has been taken. How long the pot would pay it is a different question, and the drawdown calculator is where it is answered.
Anything else taxable in the same year: the State Pension, a defined benefit pension, an annuity, rental profit, earnings from part-time work.
There is no State Pension figure on this page, deliberately. The amount is not in any rules file this site verifies, so typing one here would be an unchecked statutory figure sitting next to checked ones. Look yours up on gov.uk and put it in the box. Leave the box at £0 only if it really is £0 — the taxable part of a pension is stacked on top of everything else you receive, so with this empty the tax below is too low for almost anyone actually taking a pension.
Income tax is devolved, so a Scottish taxpayer meets a different set of bands — and gets a different amount of relief on the same contribution.
How much you are allowed to pay in
Taking taxable income — as opposed to taking only tax-free cash — triggers the money purchase annual allowance, which is much lower and cannot be topped up from earlier years.
Off by default, and deliberately: three empty boxes would assert that you paid nothing into a pension for three years, which is the most generous reading available and would raise the limit shown below by three whole allowances.
Figures are 2026/27 income tax and 2026/27 pension allowances. No National Insurance is charged on a pension withdrawal, and a contribution relieved at source or through net pay does not reduce it either. The lump sum allowance, defined benefit pensions, the annual allowance charge itself, emergency tax codes and the high income child benefit charge are not modelled. Every calculation runs in this tab: there is no application server and no database, so nothing you type is transmitted or stored. A share link is the exception — it carries your figures in the URL. What that means.
Your pension, with the working shown
What this year’s contribution costs you
| Your contribution, gross | £3,000.00 |
|---|---|
| Your employer’s contribution | £1,800.00 |
| Total into the pension this year | £4,800.00 |
| Added by the scheme at source, automatically | £600.00 |
| Relief you have to claim yourself | £600.00 |
| Total tax relief on your contribution | £1,200.00 |
| Relief as a share of your contribution | 40.00% |
| What your contribution actually cost you | £1,800.00 |
£600.00 of that relief does not arrive on its own. Under relief at source the scheme reclaims the basic rate from HMRC and adds it to your pot without being asked. Anything above the basic rate is delivered through your tax code or your tax return, and it is the part that goes unclaimed at scale — because nothing about it happens by itself. It reaches you as a smaller tax bill rather than as money in the pension, so it is only in the pot if you put it there.
The mechanism is the band, not a rebate: your contribution moves the top of the basic rate band from £37,700 of taxable income to £40,700, and every rate limit above it moves with it. Income that was taxed at a higher rate is taxed at a lower one instead.
What £1,000 into a pension is worth at other incomes
| Income | Band it lands in | Relief on £1,000 | Relief rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| £13,570 | Basic rate | £200 | 20.00% |
| £51,270 | Higher rate | £400 | 40.00% |
| £101,000 | Higher rate, in the personal allowance taper | £600 | 60.00% |
| £126,140 | Additional rate | £450 | 45.00% |
The most valuable pension contribution in the country is made between £100,000 and £125,140 of income. In that window every extra pound of income also withdraws £0.50 of personal allowance, so a pension contribution run backwards through the same mechanism is relieved at one and a half times the band rate. Notice that the row above it — a higher income, a higher band rate — is relieved at less.
How much you are allowed to pay in
| Your threshold income (income less your contribution) | £57,000.00 |
|---|---|
| Your adjusted income (income plus employer contributions) | £61,800.00 |
| Annual allowance for this year | £60,000.00 |
| Unused allowance from earlier years you can carry forward to this one | £0.00 |
| Most that can go in this year with tax relief | £60,000.00 |
| Going in this year, yours and your employer’s | £4,800.00 |
This year’s contributions are inside the allowance, so no annual allowance charge arises on these figures.
Carry forward is not included in the figures above. It is switched off until you ask for it, because three empty boxes would assert that nothing went into a pension for three years — the most generous reading available, and one that would raise the limit above by three whole allowances for a reader who never touched the field. Tick the box in the calculator to enter what actually went in.
Unused allowance is not spare capacity you have. It can only be reached through carry forward, it reaches back three years and no further, and it is only available at all if you were a member of a registered pension scheme in each of those years — which nothing on this page can know. It is also used oldest first, and this year’s own allowance has to be used up before any of it is touched. Your contributions are still capped at your earnings for relief purposes whatever the figure says.
What the pot grows to
This section is arithmetic, not a forecast. It is what would happen if the pot grew at exactly 5% every single month for 25 years, which nothing does. Real returns arrive in an order, and the order changes the answer. There is no statutory figure anywhere in this part of the calculation and nothing here has been checked against gov.uk, because a growth assumption is not the sort of thing an authority could confirm.
| Pot today | £50,000.00 |
|---|---|
| Paid in over 25 years | £120,000.00 |
| Growth over the term, after charges taken inside the pot | £226,422.29 |
| Charges deducted from the pot | −£11,625.45 |
| Pot after 25 years | £384,796.84 |
| The same pot in today’s money | £207,555.79 |
£384,797 in 25 years buys what £207,556 buys now, at 2.5% inflation. That is the figure worth planning around, and it is not the one a pension calculator usually leads with. It is a restatement of the schedule below in different units — the projection itself is unchanged, every row still adds up in the pounds of its own year, and changing the inflation assumption moves nothing except this line.
| Year | Opening | Paid in | Growth | Charges | Closing | Closing, today’s money |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | £50,000.00 | £4,800.00 | £2,606.07 | £133.80 | £57,272.27 | £55,875.39 |
| 2 | £57,272.27 | £4,800.00 | £2,969.25 | £152.45 | £64,889.07 | £61,762.35 |
| 3 | £64,889.07 | £4,800.00 | £3,349.67 | £171.99 | £72,866.75 | £67,664.02 |
| 4 | £72,866.75 | £4,800.00 | £3,748.08 | £192.45 | £81,222.38 | £73,583.47 |
| 5 | £81,222.38 | £4,800.00 | £4,165.40 | £213.88 | £89,973.90 | £79,523.82 |
| 6 | £89,973.90 | £4,800.00 | £4,602.45 | £236.31 | £99,140.04 | £85,488.15 |
| 7 | £99,140.04 | £4,800.00 | £5,060.23 | £259.83 | £108,740.44 | £91,479.55 |
| 8 | £108,740.44 | £4,800.00 | £5,539.70 | £284.43 | £118,795.71 | £97,501.17 |
| 9 | £118,795.71 | £4,800.00 | £6,041.88 | £310.22 | £129,327.37 | £103,556.09 |
| 10 | £129,327.37 | £4,800.00 | £6,567.87 | £337.21 | £140,358.03 | £109,647.47 |
| 11 | £140,358.03 | £4,800.00 | £7,118.75 | £365.50 | £151,911.28 | £115,778.39 |
| 12 | £151,911.28 | £4,800.00 | £7,695.77 | £395.13 | £164,011.92 | £121,952.03 |
| 13 | £164,011.92 | £4,800.00 | £8,300.08 | £426.16 | £176,685.84 | £128,171.51 |
| 14 | £176,685.84 | £4,800.00 | £8,933.05 | £458.65 | £189,960.24 | £134,440.03 |
| 15 | £189,960.24 | £4,800.00 | £9,595.98 | £492.69 | £203,863.53 | £140,760.75 |
| 16 | £203,863.53 | £4,800.00 | £10,290.36 | £528.33 | £218,425.56 | £147,136.90 |
| 17 | £218,425.56 | £4,800.00 | £11,017.61 | £565.68 | £233,677.49 | £153,571.69 |
| 18 | £233,677.49 | £4,800.00 | £11,779.33 | £604.79 | £249,652.03 | £160,068.37 |
| 19 | £249,652.03 | £4,800.00 | £12,577.14 | £645.74 | £266,383.43 | £166,630.22 |
| 20 | £266,383.43 | £4,800.00 | £13,412.73 | £688.67 | £283,907.49 | £173,260.49 |
| 21 | £283,907.49 | £4,800.00 | £14,287.93 | £733.62 | £302,261.80 | £179,962.53 |
| 22 | £302,261.80 | £4,800.00 | £15,204.59 | £780.70 | £321,485.69 | £186,739.68 |
| 23 | £321,485.69 | £4,800.00 | £16,164.67 | £829.96 | £341,620.40 | £193,595.34 |
| 24 | £341,620.40 | £4,800.00 | £17,170.24 | £881.58 | £362,709.06 | £200,532.90 |
| 25 | £362,709.06 | £4,800.00 | £18,223.46 | £935.68 | £384,796.84 | £207,555.79 |
25 years, rolled up from monthly periods — the projection steps 300 times and this table shows the year ends. The CSV export contains every period.
What comes out, and what the taxman takes
| Tax-free cash (25.00% of the pot) | £96,199.21 |
|---|---|
| The same tax-free cash in today’s money | £51,888.95 |
| Left in the pot, taxable when you take it | £288,597.63 |
| Pension income you take in the year | £20,000.00 |
| Your other retirement income | £0.00 |
| Total taxable income for the year | £20,000.00 |
| Income tax on all of it | £1,486.00 |
| Of which the pension income caused (the bill with it, less the bill without it) | £1,486.00 |
| Pension income after that tax | £18,514.00 |
| Band | Income in it | Rate | Tax |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic rate | £7,430.00 | 20.00% | £1,486.00 |
Effective rate on your total income 7.43%. Rate on your next £1 20.00% — a probe on the next pound of earned income, which is what a pension withdrawal is.
Another £30,270 of income would take you into the Higher rate.
How long the pot would pay that income is a different question, and this page does not answer it: it depends on what the pot earns after you start taking money out, and the order those returns arrive in matters far more once money is leaving than while it is only going in. The pension drawdown calculator works out the year an income would first fall short and the largest level income a pot pays for a whole term. If you would rather buy a guaranteed income instead, the annuity calculator prices that.
The cap on the tax-free cash is not applied here. The 25.00% share is a figure this site checks against gov.uk. The cash limit on it — the lump sum allowance — is not modelled by the tax engine at all, so on a large pot the figure above can be more tax-free cash than you are actually entitled to take. Check the allowance on gov.uk before relying on it.
Worked example: a 2026/27 pension, paid into for 25 years
These are the figures the calculator above loads with, so every number in this section can be checked against it without typing anything. A £50,000.00 pot, a £60,000.00 salary, £3,000.00 a year from you through relief at source and £1,800.00 from your employer, 5% a year assumed growth, a 0.25% platform charge and 2.5% inflation, over 25 years in 2026/27.
| Total into the pension this year | £4,800.00 |
|---|---|
| Tax relief on your share of it | £1,200.00 |
| What your contribution cost you | £1,800.00 |
| Pot after 25 years | £384,796.84 |
| The same pot in today’s money | £207,555.79 |
| Tax-free cash from it | £96,199.21 |
| Income tax on £20,000.00 of pension income, with no other income | £1,486.00 |
Four things in that table are worth pausing on.
- Half the relief does not arrive on its own. £600.00 was added to the pot by the scheme without anyone asking. The other £600.00 arrives only through a tax code or a tax return — as a smaller tax bill rather than as money in the pension — and it is the part HMRC says goes unclaimed at scale.
- The employer’s £1,800.00 costs you nothing and counts against your allowance anyway. It gets no relief through your tax return, because it was never your income. It is still pension input, so the annual allowance is measured against £4,800.00 rather than against your own £3,000.00.
- The same £1,000 is worth 60.00% between £100,000 and £125,140 of income — more than at any income above it. In that window a pound of income also withdraws personal allowance, so a contribution unwinds two charges at once. The table on the calculator shows every band side by side, and the column does not run in order.
- £384,797 in 25 years buys what £207,556 buys today. Both are the same projection. The second is the first deflated once, at the end, at 2.5% a year — it is a change of units and not a second, gloomier projection, and it does not move a single row of the schedule.
Methodology and sources
Three calculations, and which claim belongs to which
A pension is three questions joined at one figure. What goes in — your contribution, the relief on it, your employer’s contribution, and the legal limit on the lot — is tax. What it grows to is a projection. What comes out — the tax-free cash and the income tax on the rest — is tax again. They are computed by different code and they rest on different kinds of claim, so the rest of this section keeps them apart on purpose.
Relief is a subtraction, not a rate
Tax relief is not a figure anybody computes directly: it is the difference between the tax bill of a taxpayer with the contribution and the tax bill of the same taxpayer without it. So that is how it is worked out here — two complete income tax calculations, subtracted. Nothing on this page multiplies a contribution by a marginal rate, and it must not, because the shortcut gets the £100,000 band wrong, gets a contribution that straddles a threshold wrong, and gets Scotland wrong twice over.
Under relief at source — a SIPP, a personal pension, and many workplace schemes — the scheme reclaims the basic rate from HMRC and adds it to the pot, so £80 paid in becomes £100 of pension. Relief above the basic rate is not paid to the scheme: it is delivered by moving the top of the basic rate band up by the whole gross contribution, along with every rate limit above it. Under a net pay arrangement the employer deducts the contribution before operating PAYE, so relief lands at the marginal rate automatically and no band moves — nothing needs to, because the income never entered the higher band. Neither reduces National Insurance. Salary sacrifice does, and it is a different calculation on the salary sacrifice calculator.
Above £100,000 of income the personal allowance is withdrawn at £1 for every £2 of income, and a pension contribution is deducted from the income that withdrawal is measured against. A contribution made between £100,000 and £125,140 therefore unwinds two charges at once, and is relieved at one and a half times the band rate. The table on the calculator measures that rather than describing it.
Two limits, and they are not the same limit
Relief is capped at the greater of your relevant UK earnings and £3,600 a year. Contribute beyond it and the excess simply attracts nothing. The annual allowance caps tax-privileged saving instead: exceed it and the contribution is relieved in full and then charged back through an annual allowance charge at your marginal rate. The two bite in different ways on the same pound, and a calculator that shows one of them and calls it "the limit" will tell somebody the wrong thing.
The annual allowance is measured against everything that goes in, including your employer’s contribution — which is frequently the larger of the two and is frequently missing from other calculators’ arithmetic. For high earners it is tapered, and the taper only bites when both threshold income and adjusted income are above their limits: testing adjusted income alone is the classic error and it over-taxes people with a modest salary and a generous employer.
Unused allowance from earlier years is not spare capacity you have. It can only be reached through carry forward, it reaches back three years and no further, this year’s own allowance has to be used first, and it is available at all only if you were a member of a registered pension scheme in each of those years — which nothing on this page can know. The allowance was not the same in every one of those years, so it is read year by year rather than by multiplying this year’s figure by three.
The projection makes an arithmetic claim, and no other
There is no statutory figure anywhere in this half of the calculation. The growth rate, the charge, the inflation assumption and the term are all yours, and there is nothing in them an authority could confirm, because a growth assumption is not the sort of thing that can be correct. So this part carries no gov.uk verification claim and it will not borrow one from the tax half. The claim it makes is arithmetic: given these inputs and the conventions stated here, the schedule is right and every figure is read off it.
A fixed-rate projection is not a forecast. Nothing grows at the same rate every period. Real returns arrive in an order, and the order changes the outcome. Treat every figure about the pot as what a constant rate would have produced: useful for comparing two plans, poor for predicting a balance.
Today’s money is a change of units
The schedule is nominal throughout — every row is in the pounds of the year it falls in, and every row reconciles exactly. The today’s-money figures are that finished schedule deflated once, at the end, by (1 + inflation)years. Deflating inside the loop would produce a table whose growth column was neither the real return nor the nominal one and whose rows still had to add up. Changing the inflation assumption moves nothing else on the page: it is presentation, not a second projection with a lower growth rate, and the two are not the same thing.
The tax on what comes out
Normally 25.00% of a defined contribution pot can be taken free of income tax. The rest is taxed as earned income in the year it is withdrawn: it is added to your other income and charged at whatever rate that income has already taken you to, rather than starting again at the personal allowance. So the pension income and the other-income box go into the tax engine together, and the tax attributable to the pension is measured — the bill with it, less the bill without it. No National Insurance is charged on a pension withdrawal, at any age, so none is shown.
There is no State Pension figure anywhere on this page. The amount is not in any rules file this site verifies, and typing one in would put an unchecked statutory figure next to checked ones. The other-income box is where yours goes, and leaving it at zero understates the tax for almost anybody actually taking a pension.
Where the tax figures come from
- gov.uk — Income tax rates and allowances: current and past
- gov.uk — Tax on your private pension contributions
- gov.uk — Pension schemes rates and allowances
- gov.scot — Scottish income tax rates and bands
The income tax rates, thresholds and allowances this page calculates with — the annual allowance and its taper, and the 25.00% tax-free share — were verified against gov.uk on 12 August 2026. That check covers the published figures used by the tax parts of this page and nothing else. It does not verify any figure the page produces, and it does not reach the projection at all: the growth rate, the charge, the inflation assumption and the term have no published source to be checked against. The check was carried out automatically and no named person has signed it off. Check anything that matters against gov.uk, or with an accountant or a regulated adviser.
What this calculator does not model
- The lump sum allowance — the cash cap on tax-free cash. The 25.00% rate is in the tax engine and is verified; the cap on it is not in the engine at all. On a large pot this page shows more tax-free cash than could actually be taken.
- The annual allowance charge itself. The excess over the allowance is reported; the charge on it is not computed. It falls at your marginal rate on top of your other income, and it has to be declared on a self assessment return whether or not the scheme pays it for you.
- Income other than the salary in the box. Rental profit, dividends, savings interest and self-employed profit all change the relief and can change the annual allowance taper. The salary is treated as the whole of your taxable income and as your relevant UK earnings, which is right for an employee and wrong for anyone else.
- Salary sacrifice, which reduces gross pay rather than being a contribution at all — see the salary sacrifice calculator. It is worth knowing that from 6 April 2029 only the first £2,000 a year of pension salary sacrifice keeps its National Insurance exemption; income tax relief is unaffected. That change is after every tax year this calculator offers.
- Defined benefit pensions. Nothing on this page applies to a final salary scheme: the input is measured differently, and a member with both scheme types has two allowances rather than the one flat limit shown here.
- How long the pot lasts. That is decumulation, it depends on the order returns arrive in after you start taking money out, and it is answered on the pension drawdown calculator.
- Anything about you. No age, no life expectancy, no health, no partner, no other savings, no State Pension age. This is information, not advice: it does not recommend a contribution, a rate, a product or a provider, and no figure on it is a personal recommendation.
Nothing you type here is transmitted or stored — there is no application server and no database. A share link is the exception: it carries your figures in the URL, and opening one is an ordinary request that carries them to the host. What that means.
Pension questions
- How much will my pension be worth?
That depends entirely on what you and your employer pay in, what it grows at and what the charges are — the first is a fact and the other two are assumptions. On the calculator's default figures a £50,000.00 pot with £4,800.00 a year going in reaches £384,797 after 25 years at 5% a year — which is £207,556 in today's money at 2.5% inflation. The second figure is the one worth planning around. Neither is a forecast: a fixed-rate projection is what one constant rate would have produced, and nothing grows at a constant rate.
- How much tax relief do I get on pension contributions?
At your marginal rate, but "your marginal rate" is not a single number and this is where most calculators go wrong. On the default figures a £3,000.00 contribution attracts £1,200.00 of relief — 40.00% of it. Under relief at source the basic rate is added to your pot automatically by the scheme; anything above that is delivered through your tax code or tax return and does not arrive on its own. Between £100,000 and £125,140 of income the rate is higher still, because a contribution there also restores personal allowance that was being withdrawn.
- Is pension tax relief really 60% between £100,000 and £125,140?
Yes, and the calculator measures it rather than asserting it: on 2026/27 rates a £1,000 contribution at £101,000 of income is worth £600.00, a rate of 60.00%. The mechanism is that income above £100,000 withdraws the personal allowance at £1 for every £2, and a pension contribution comes off the income that withdrawal is measured against. So the contribution is relieved at its band rate and unwinds the allowance withdrawal as well. In Scotland the same window falls in the advanced rate band, where the arithmetic gives more again. Note what that means for the row above it: relief at the very top rate is worth less than relief in this window.
- Does my employer’s contribution use up my allowance?
Yes. The annual allowance is measured against everything that goes into your pensions in the year, and your employer's contribution counts in full even though it never was your income and attracts no relief through your tax return. On a generous scheme it is the larger of the two figures, which is why it is a field here and why the allowance check below adds it in. It also raises your adjusted income, which is one of the two tests that decide whether your allowance is tapered.
- What happens if I pay in more than the annual allowance?
The contribution is relieved in full and then charged back through an annual allowance charge at your marginal rate. It is a separate liability on a separate part of a self assessment return, and it has to be declared whether or not the scheme pays it for you. This calculator reports the excess and deliberately does not compute the charge — the stacking is not settled cleanly enough in published guidance to build on. The point of showing the excess at all is that most pension calculators let you type a contribution well beyond the legal limit and say nothing.
- Can I carry forward unused pension allowance?
Sometimes, and it is worth being precise about the conditions rather than treating the figure as spare capacity. Carry forward reaches back three tax years and no further; this year's own allowance has to be used up first; the unused amounts are used oldest first; and it is available only if you were a member of a registered pension scheme in each of those years. It cannot be used at all against the money purchase annual allowance. Your relief is still capped at your relevant UK earnings whatever the carry-forward figure says, so a large unused balance does not let anyone contribute more than they earn.
- How much of my pension can I take tax-free?
Normally 25.00% of a defined contribution pot. There is also a cash cap on it, the lump sum allowance, which bites on large pots — and this calculator does not apply that cap, because the tax engine behind it does not model it. So the tax-free figure shown here is right on an ordinary pot and too high on a big one. The rest of the pot is taxed as earned income in the year you take it, stacked on top of everything else you receive that year, and no National Insurance is charged on any of it.
- Does this include the State Pension?
No, and that is deliberate rather than an omission. The published full rate is a figure this site holds and checks against gov.uk, but it is what a complete National Insurance record buys — not what any particular person gets. Putting it into the arithmetic would understate what most readers need, in the one direction a pension calculator must never err. There is an "other retirement income" box instead, it defaults to zero, and yours belongs in it — check your own forecast on gov.uk, because the amount depends on your National Insurance record rather than on a single published rate. Leaving that box empty understates the tax on your pension income, because the State Pension is taxable and uses most of the personal allowance before your pension pays a penny.
- What does this projection do about inflation?
It restates the pot in today's money and changes nothing else. The schedule stays nominal — every row is in the pounds of its own year and reconciles exactly — and the today's-money figures are that finished schedule deflated once, at the end. That is a change of units rather than a second, gloomier projection, and moving the inflation assumption moves only those figures. The separate "increase both contributions each year" box is the other half of the same question: a contribution that keeps pace with your pay is real money going in, so it does change the projection.
- How long will my pension pot last?
This page does not answer that, and the reason is worth stating: once money is coming out, the order returns arrive in matters far more than the average, because a poor run of years early on sells more of the pot to fund the same income. That is a different calculation and it has its own page — the pension drawdown calculator works out the year an income would first fall short and the largest level income a pot would pay for a whole term. This page stops at what the pot is worth and what the first year of taking it costs in tax.
- Should I pay more into my pension?
This page will not answer that, and no calculator honestly can. It is information, not advice: it does not know your debts, your other savings, whether you need the money before retirement, or what else the same pound could do. What it can show is what a contribution you choose is actually worth after tax, what the legal limit on it is, and what the pot does under an assumption you supplied. A decision that matters is worth taking to a regulated financial adviser — MoneyHelper, the free government-backed guidance service, is a sensible first stop.