Hundred SummersDownsizing 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.
Loading the calculator… (requires JavaScript; your figures never leave your browser)
Worked example
Computed when this page was built by the same engine that runs the calculator above, so the figures below and the live tool can never disagree. Change any input above to see your own.
| Inputs | |
|---|---|
| Current home | £550,000 |
| New home | £350,000 |
| Moving costs incl. stamp duty | £20,000 |
| Age | 70 |
| Results | |
|---|---|
| Capital freed after costs | £180,000 |
| Share of the old home's value freed | 33% |
| Lifetime income it could buy (annuity) | £14,760 a year at 8.2% |
| Or drawn at 4% to 95 | £12,771 a year |
The next question
What would the stamp duty be on the next home? →Stamp duty calculator
Or answer it with everything else: the full Hundred Summers plan connects your pay, pensions, savings, property, tax and spending year by year, and stress-tests them across 500 simulated market histories.
Read the guides
- Care home fees: the numbers nobody explains until it's urgent →What care actually costs, the £23,250 means-test line and when the home counts, why councils pay less than you would, and how to stress-test a plan against a late-life care phase.
- Stamp duty when you move: three taxes and the buy-before-you-sell surcharge →SDLT, LBTT and LTT side by side at 2026/27 rates, worked figures for a £300,000 home in each nation, why the additional-property surcharge catches ordinary movers, and the refund window if the old home sells later.
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.