Pension Calculator

The formula uses Final Average Salary -- the average of your highest- earning years, typically the last three to five before retirement -- not your salary today. If you expect meaningful raises before retiring, Final Average Salary will run higher than Current Annual Salary, so entering today's salary in that field would understate the benefit; the calculator defaults Final Average Salary to your Current Annual Salary only as a starting point you should adjust.

Most defined-benefit plans use somewhere between 1.5% and 2.5% per year of service, though the exact figure is set entirely by each plan and varies by employer, job class, and sometimes by years of service tier. A teacher's pension plan, a police and fire plan, and a federal employee plan can all use different multipliers even within the same state, so check your plan's official summary rather than assuming a typical figure applies to you.

Estimated Total Pension Value multiplies Annual Pension by an assumed number of years in retirement, calculated here as age 85 minus Retirement Age. A later Retirement Age shortens that assumed collection period even though it leaves the annual benefit itself unchanged, so Estimated Total Pension Value can fall even as Years Until Retirement falls too -- fewer assumed years of collecting the same annual amount.

It's a single round-number illustration, not a personalized life-expectancy estimate. Actual life expectancy varies by individual health, family history, and demographic factors that this calculator has no way to account for, so someone who lives past 85 collects substantially more in total pension payments than this figure shows, and this number should be treated as a rough planning anchor, not a forecast.