Downsizing calculator — what moving smaller really frees up

Sell the family home, buy something smaller, and the difference — minus the very real costs of moving — becomes spendable capital, entirely tax-free under private residence relief. This calculator runs the same arithmetic the Hundred Summers app applies at your chosen downsizing age, then prices the freed capital as income both ways: a guaranteed annuity at the engine's indicative rates, and level drawdown. Your figures never leave your browser.

The trade, priced honestly

Downsizing is the retirement lever people hold longest and price least. The capital is real and tax-free; so are the frictions — stamp duty, fees, and the fact that most people move five years later than the spreadsheet suggests, because a home isn't a spreadsheet row. What this page shows is the honest core: what's actually freed after costs, and what income that capital could buy at your age — guaranteed for life via an annuity, or drawn down with the balance still yours.

The number this page can't show is the one that usually decides it: what the move does to your whole plan — ownership costs saved every year, care optionality kept, inheritance shape changed. The full Hundred Summers plan models downsizing as an event in your actual projection (proceeds invested into your accounts, grown, taxed and drawn alongside everything else) and lets you compare it directly against equity release on your own figures.