How much should I have saved by 50?
A rule of thumb gives a multiple of salary. Your own number comes from what you spend, what else you will receive, and when you plan to stop.
A rule of thumb gives a multiple of salary. Your own number comes from what you spend, what else you will receive, and when you plan to stop.
The rule appears in newspaper tables and on LinkedIn: one times your salary saved by 30, three times by 40, six times by 50, eight by 60.
It works as a rough sense-check. It cannot tell you whether you will be short, because it is not built from your spending, your other income, or when you plan to stop.
Two people earning £70,000 at 50 get the same target from the rule: £420,000. One spends £2,800 a month and has a paid-off house. The other spends £4,600 and has eleven years left on the mortgage. Their real targets are far apart, because spending sets the target.
Salary tells you what arrived. Spending is what a retirement has to fund. Two people on the same income can need pots several hundred thousand pounds apart.
A defined benefit pension, a rental property, a spouse's income, the State Pension — each one reduces what your own pot has to produce. A multiple-of-salary target leaves all of them out.
Anyone who has changed employer since auto-enrolment began in 2012 is likely to hold more than one pot. The rule assumes you know your total.
For some owners the business is worth more than every pension put together. For others it has no value to anybody else. The rule has no column for it.
Priti and Mark are both 50. Both put £600 a month into a pension, including whatever their employer or their company adds. Both want to stop at 65. The only difference between them is where they started.
Steady saver since her twenties. £150,000 in her pension at 50.
Ran a business through his thirties and forties and put the company first. £60,000 at 50.
Priti's £150,000 plus £600 a month becomes roughly £370,000 by 65. Mark's £60,000 plus the same £600 a month becomes roughly £229,000.
About £141,000, from the same contribution over the same years. The difference is the pot each of them held at 50.
Say Mark raises his contribution to £900 a month from 50, once the business is steadier. His pot at 65 comes to roughly £297,000, about £73,000 short of Priti's. Money saved before 50 has the longest to grow, so for Mark the stop date and the spending figure move the answer more than the contribution. The four levers that move a retirement number covers all four.
Ask whether your pot, run forward from here, pays for what you want to spend for as long as you need it.
Three numbers do it: what you spend now, what else will be coming in (the full new State Pension is £12,547.60 a year in 2026/27, paid from State Pension age), and what your pot is worth today. The free projection takes those three and shows, in about two minutes, the age your money runs out on your current trajectory.
The free Healthcheck reads your spending off your bank account in about two minutes.
Auto-enrolment has been compulsory since 2012, so anyone who's had more than one employer since then is likely to have more than one pot. Tracing them comes before any decision about saving more.
Auto-enrolment's minimum is 8% of qualifying earnings, split between employee and employer. It is a legal floor and is not set from anyone's retirement spending.
“I'll sell the business” depends on a buyer and a price. Model it at what it would fetch and at zero, so the gap between the two versions is visible.
A full new State Pension is £12,547.60 a year in 2026/27, but gaps in a National Insurance record are common and it isn't automatic. Your own forecast on gov.uk takes five minutes and shows your figure.
The forecast on gov.uk is free and takes five minutes. It shows what's coming and whether a gap can still be filled.
Include old employers' schemes. The government's free tracing service at gov.uk/find-pension-contact-details finds the ones you've lost the paperwork for.
The Healthcheck gets a real figure from your bank in about two minutes.
Add the pots together, add the spending figure, and run the projection. It shows the age your money runs out on your own figures.
If several parts are pulling against each other — a business nobody's valued, old pensions nobody's traced, a stop date that's still a guess — the Financial Plan puts every pot in one projection, applies UK tax year by year, and runs to 100.
It is a population-level sense check, calibrated to an average income and an assumed average spending pattern that may have nothing to do with yours. If you earn £70,000 and spend £2,200 a month with the mortgage paid off, six times salary would have you saving for a larger retirement than the one you're planning. If you earn £45,000 and spend £3,600 a month because you're still supporting adult children, the rule would leave you short without showing it. Use it as a rough early warning if you're far off in either direction, and replace it with your own figures as soon as you can.
No, but it changes which lever matters most. At 50 you likely still have fifteen or more years before you'd want to stop, and that's time for contributions to compound. In the example above, raising Mark's contribution from £600 to £900 a month recovered about £68,000 of his £141,000 gap. At this age the stop date and the spending figure move the answer more than any realistic increase in contributions. The next step is finding out how far off you are, which a two-minute projection will show on your own figures.
For a joint retirement, yes, because you'll likely be drawing on both incomes and both pots to fund one household's spending. A defined benefit pension held by one partner behaves differently from a pot of savings. It pays a guaranteed, usually inflation-linked income for life, and does not run down like a lump sum. A couple with one modest defined contribution pot each and one meaningful final salary pension between them can be in a stronger position than the raw pot totals suggest, because that guaranteed income acts as a floor under everything else. Model both people and both income types together, so the projection includes that floor.
Pensions from old jobs have had two or three decades to grow untouched, so they can be worth more than you remember. The government's Pension Tracing Service at gov.uk/find-pension-contact-details is free and gives you a provider's current contact details from the old employer's name. From there, write to the provider with your dates of employment and National Insurance number and ask for a current statement. Do this before deciding whether you're behind, because a forgotten £35,000 pot from a job you left in 2003 changes the answer more than most changes to how much you save from here.
It counts. Leaving it out makes the pot you need look bigger than it is. The full new State Pension is £12,547.60 a year in 2026/27 (£241.30 a week), index-linked and guaranteed for life, which for a couple who both qualify in full is £25,095.20 between them with no investment risk attached. Check two things on gov.uk: your own forecast, because gaps in a National Insurance record are common, and your State Pension age, which for people now in their fifties is 67. Include your forecast figure in the projection once you've checked it.
Start with the free projection. It takes about two minutes, works in today's money, and gives you the age your own money runs out on your current numbers. Before you run it, get two things right: your real spending, using the Healthcheck, and every pension you hold, tracing the old ones if you're not sure. Those two facts, run through the calculator, give an answer built from your own life. If the picture has several moving parts pulling against each other, the Financial Plan brings them into one projection with UK tax applied year by year.
An hour with a planner on whether the Financial Plan suits your position.
A written plan: every year to age 100 with UK tax applied, each risk measured in years, and your next ninety days.