Hundred SummersRetirement Living Standards checker: minimum, moderate or comfortable?
Enter the retirement income you expect (State Pension, other pensions, anything else taxable), and see which Pensions UK standard it reaches after income tax, for one person or a couple, and what the next standard up would take in extra income. 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 | |
|---|---|
| Household | One person |
| State Pension | £12,548 |
| Other pension income (gross) | £15,000 |
| Other taxable income | £0 |
| Results | |
|---|---|
| Income after tax | £24,552 |
| Income tax | £2,996 |
| Standard reached | Minimum |
| Extra after tax to reach moderate | £8,148 |
| Extra gross pension income that takes | £10,184 |
The next question
How much do I need to retire? →How much do I need to retire?
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
- How much do I need to retire in the UK? Solved, not guessed →Why 25× spending, £500k-for-everyone and half-your-age rules all miss, what actually moves the number (tax, the State Pension, your dates), and how a real projection solves it.
- Drawing retirement income as a couple: the coordination dividend →Two personal allowances, two basic-rate bands, tax-free transfers between spouses: why the same household income can cost thousands less when drawn as a couple, and how Hundred Summers computes the split.
- Inflation: the assumption everything rests on →What 2.5% a year does to money over a retirement, what UK prices actually did since 1988 on the ONS index, why every figure in a Hundred Summers plan is in today's money, and how the plan is stress-tested against inflation that does not behave.
A lifestyle benchmark, not a budget
The standards answer the question most people start with, what does a decent retirement cost?, with a researched shopping basket rather than a rule of thumb. They are quoted after tax, which is where most online comparisons go wrong: pension income is taxable, the State Pension eats most of the personal allowance, and a couple pays less tax than a single person on the same household income because each partner has an allowance. This checker taxes each person on the Hundred Summers engine’s current bands before comparing.
From a standard to a plan
The gap to the next standard is shown as extra net income, as the gross pension income that would deliver it at your tax position, and, as an illustration only, as a pot at a 4% withdrawal rate. Your own sustainable rate depends on age, other income and how the money is invested: the safe withdrawal rate calculator solves it by projection, the how much to retire calculator sizes the pot, and the full plan runs the whole thing through 500 market scenarios.
Sources
- Pensions UK, Retirement Living Standards: the May 2026 update (research by Loughborough University’s Centre for Research in Social Policy).
- Income tax bands: HMRC Income Tax rates and Personal Allowances; Scottish rates from gov.scot.
- Full new State Pension: gov.uk.