How Much to Save for Retirement: % by Starting Age

How much should I save for retirement?

Save about 15% of your gross income if you start by your early 30s and a pension will cover part of your retirement, or from 25 with no pension at all if you assume a 5% return after inflation. Start at 40 and it's roughly 20-40%; start at 50 and it's 45% or more. That assumes retiring at 65, a 4-5% return after inflation and a 25x target.

Your own rate moves with three inputs: the age you start, the return you assume, and how much of your income a pension already replaces. Across the OECD the average state pension pays 52% of the pre-retirement wage for an average earner, close to 80% in Greece and Spain and just under 30% in Poland, so if yours is that generous, your rate sits below the "pension covers 30%" column in the table. If you're self-employed with nothing coming, use the no-pension column. Fidelity's 15% also carries a safety margin for poor markets that the plain maths leaves out.

The savings rate you need, by starting age

Inputs: gross income flat after inflation, retire at 65, nothing saved at the start, one contribution at the end of each year, and a target of 25 times the income the portfolio has to replace. The retirement income goal is 70% of your gross pay. In the "pension covers 30%" columns your savings provide the other 40%; in the "no pension" columns they provide all 70%.

Start age	Years saving	5% real, pension covers 30%	5% real, no pension	4% real, pension covers 30%	4% real, no pension
25	40	8%	15%	11%	18%
30	35	11%	19%	14%	24%
35	30	15%	26%	18%	31%
40	25	21%	37%	24%	42%
45	20	30%	53%	34%	59%
50	15	46%	81%	50%	87%

Data: own calculation, retire at 65, 5% real return, target 25x the income savings must replace (70% of gross); return assumption from the UBS Global Investment Returns Yearbook 2025.

The 25x target is the 4% rule. In the Trinity study, taking 4% of the starting pot each year, raised with inflation, lasted 30 years in 98% of historical periods for an all-stock portfolio. A 50/50 mix of stocks and bonds managed 95%. The return columns come from the long record: world equities earned 5.2% a year after inflation from 1900 to 2024, bonds 1.7%; both the 5% and 4% columns in the table sit below that equity figure. To turn your row into a monthly amount and an end balance, run it through the free compound interest calculator, no sign-up.

The rates jump at the bottom of the table because a later start leaves fewer years of compounding: a 25-year-old gets 40 years of growth, and at 5% real only a third of the final pot is money they paid in, the rest being compound interest on earlier deposits. A 45-year-old has 20 years, and 60% of the pot comes straight out of their salary.

Retiring at 65 is also slightly early: the OECD normal retirement age for people who started work in 2024 is 66.4 for men and 65.9 for women, and 70 or more in Denmark, Estonia, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden. Stop working before your state pension starts and the portfolio has to cover those gap years alone, which pushes you toward the no-pension column.

Where the 15% rule comes from (and when it breaks)

The 15% comes from Fidelity, whose guideline is to save at least 15% of pre-tax income a year, including any employer contribution, from 25 to 67. In that plan your savings cover about 45% of pre-retirement income and pensions the rest. Start at 30 and Fidelity's number becomes 18%; start at 35 and it's 23%.

Fidelity's figures sit above the table because they're built with safety margins. The plan is designed to hold at a 90% confidence level, which means poor markets. It also assumes a shift into bonds as you age and real wage growth of 1.5% a year. Put Fidelity's own inputs (savings replace 45%, retire at 67) through the formula below and a 25-year-old needs 8% at 5% real or 11% at 4%, against Fidelity's 15%.

On the plain maths, 15% is enough if you start by your early 30s with a pension behind you, or at 25 with no pension and the 5% return:

Your situation	At 5% real	At 4% real
Pension covers ~30%, start at 25	Enough (8%)	Enough (11%)
Pension covers ~30%, start at 30	Enough (11%)	Enough (14%)
Pension covers ~30%, start at 35	Just (15%)	Short (18%)
No pension, start at 25	Just (15%)	Short (18%)
No pension, start at 30	Short (19%)	Short (24%)

For scale, euro-area households saved 14.4% of disposable income in Q4 2025. That figure covers every kind of saving, house deposits and holiday money included, and is measured on take-home pay rather than gross.

The maths, so you can check it

rate = 25 × R / [((1 + r)^n − 1) / r]

R is the share of gross income the portfolio must replace (0.40 or 0.70), r is the real return (0.04 or 0.05) and n is the number of years until you retire. The bracket is what saving 1 a year for n years grows to; 25 × R on top is the target pot, measured in years of salary.

Worked example: €50,000 gross salary, start at 35, retire at 65, 5% real, pension covers 30%.

1. The portfolio has to replace 40% of income, so €20,000 a year.
2. Target: 25 × €20,000 = €500,000, in euros of today's buying power.
3. Growth factor for 30 years at 5%: (1.05^30 − 1) / 0.05 = 66.44.
4. Yearly saving: €500,000 / 66.44 = €7,526. That's 15.1% of salary, about €627 a month.

At 4% real the same person needs 17.8%, about €743 a month. Salary cancels out of the formula, so 15.1% is the answer at €30,000 or €90,000, and in any currency.

To check it with monthly deposits, enter this in the same calculator: starting balance 0, monthly contribution 627, years 30, annual return 5%, inflation 0 (or a nominal return around 7% with inflation at 2% and the today's-money toggle switched on). The final balance lands a bit above 500,000, because monthly deposits start growing earlier than the once-a-year deposits behind the table. Paying in at the start of each year instead of the end shaves about 5% off every rate, so the 35-year-old's 15.1% becomes 14.3%.

How much should I save per month?

Multiply your gross monthly income by the rate from your row. Using the 5% real, pension-covers-30% column:

Gross monthly income	Start at 30 (11%)	Start at 35 (15%)	Start at 40 (21%)
€3,000	€330	€450	€630
€4,000	€440	€600	€840
€5,000	€550	€750	€1,050

Contributions into a workplace pension pot count toward the rate, whoever pays them. Fidelity counts the employer's share the same way. If your employer puts in 5% of salary, a 15% target means 10% from you. The "pension covers 30%" columns are about a different thing: a state pension, or a workplace pension that pays a fixed income for life.

Because the table works on gross pay, the same euros are a bigger share of your take-home pay if that's what you budget from, and how much bigger depends on your tax and social contributions. Set the euro figure from your row of the table up as a standing order dated on payday.

How much should I have saved by age 30, 40, 50?

Saving 15% of gross income from 25 at 5% real, your pot grows like this (multiples of one year's gross salary):

Age	Saved so far
30	0.8x salary
35	1.9x
40	3.2x
45	5.0x
50	7.2x
55	10x

Data: own year-by-year calculation, 15.1% of gross income saved at the end of each year, 5% real return.

At 10x the pension-case target (25 × 40%) is already reached at 55, ten years early. Someone starting at 35 follows the same path ten years later and arrives at 10x exactly at 65. Reported household figures for each age group are in net worth by age.

Starting late: what actually moves the number

Starting at 40, the default answer is 21% (5% real, pension covers 30%). The table moves two levers, retiring later and needing your savings to replace less of your income:

Change	Rate needed
Nothing (retire at 65, savings replace 40%)	21%
Retire at 67	18%
Retire at 68	17%
Retire at 70	15%
Savings replace 35% instead of 40%	18%
Savings replace 30%	16%
Retire at 68 and replace 35%	15%

The later-retirement rows keep the target at 25x even though retirement is shorter, so they lean cautious. Three extra working years plus a retirement budget 5 points of income cheaper bring a 40-year-old back to the same 15% a 35-year-old needs. A smaller replacement figure comes from lower spending in retirement or a bigger pension.

Pay rises are a third lever: raising your monthly investment every year by part of each raise closes the gap to 21% over time while take-home pay still grows. In the compound interest calculator, "+ Compare another scenario" puts 25 years next to 28 years on the same monthly contribution, and the longer line is retiring at 68 instead of 65.

Save vs invest: where the money should go

Every rate above assumes retirement money beyond your emergency fund earns 4-5% a year after inflation, and since 1900 only equities have delivered that, while Treasury bills earned 0.5% real. Park the 35-year-old's 15.1% in a savings account that only keeps up with inflation and after 30 years it adds up to about 4.5 years of salary instead of 10.

For the first 15 years or so, the savings rate moves the result more than investment returns and more than the fund you pick: growth on the balance doesn't overtake the yearly deposit until year 16 at 5% real, or year 19 at 4%.

Over a full career most of the final pot is growth, two thirds of it for a 25-year-old, and fees come off that growth every year: a 1% annual fee taken off a 5% real return pushes the 35-year-old's required rate from 15.1% to 17.8%, the same damage as assuming 4% instead of 5%. The US regulator's fee example shows the same thing in money: $100,000 growing 4% a year for 20 years ends near $208,000 with a 0.25% fee and near $179,000 with 1%.

Annual fee (pension case, 5% real before fees)	Start at 25	Start at 35
0%	8.3%	15.1%
0.2%	8.7%	15.6%
0.5%	9.3%	16.4%
1.0%	10.5%	17.8%

Going from a 0% to a 0.2% fee moves the rate by up to half a point, and going to 1% moves it by two to three points. Before you raise the transfer, look up your current fund's annual fee and read your rate off the matching row.