✦ Free Calculator

Retiring before 65? Here's what health coverage really costs.

Most early-retirement math stops at "COBRA is expensive" or "budget $1,500/month for insurance." This calculator doesn't guess — it runs your actual income against the real ACA premium tax credit formula, including the MAGI cliffs that can silently cost you thousands. Drop it into your own article in one script tag, and it looks like it was built for your site, not bolted onto it.

Sibling of <retirement-calc-spend> — same engine, different question.

Full explanation: ACA Subsidies in Early Retirement →

See it in context

Here's exactly what that looks like — a live instance embedded inside a sample article, using someone else's fonts and colors, not ours.

bridgeandbracket.com/blog/aca-subsidy-magi-cliff-early-retirement

Healthcare & Bridge Planning · 7 min read

The MAGI Cliff Nobody Warns You About Before You Retire Early

Bridge & Bracket
Healthcare-bridge & early-retirement income planning

Every early-retiree client eventually asks the same question, usually with some alarm: "What happens to my health insurance?" The honest answer isn't a flat monthly number — it's a formula, and the formula cares a lot about how you report your income in the years before Medicare.

The rule-of-thumb trap

"Budget $1,200 a month for insurance" gets repeated so often it starts to sound like planning. It isn't. Your actual ACA premium is a function of your Modified Adjusted Gross Income relative to the Federal Poverty Level for your household size — and that relationship isn't a smooth slope. Report income just above certain thresholds and the subsidy you were counting on can shrink or disappear, sometimes over a difference of a few thousand dollars.

Why this is a bridge problem, not a one-year problem

The gap between "retired" and "Medicare-eligible at 65" can run five, ten, even fifteen years for an early retiree. Every one of those years, MAGI has to be managed — which accounts get drawn, how much gets converted to Roth, how much capital gains gets realized — because each choice moves the subsidy math. A withdrawal strategy that ignores this can cost more in lost subsidy than it saves in taxes.

The subsidy cliff doesn't ask how much you have saved — it asks how much income you reported this year.

Try it with your own numbers

Enter your retirement age, expected MAGI during the bridge years, and household size to the right, and see your real premium range and total bridge cost — not a flat estimate.

What this number doesn't tell you

A bridge-cost estimate is a starting point, not the whole plan — it doesn't yet account for state-specific subsidy variations, employer retiree coverage if you have it, or a strategy of deliberately shaping income to stay under a cliff threshold. If the number surprises you, that's usually the start of a real income-sequencing conversation, not the end of one.

Try it

That's the exact <retirement-calc-aca> widget, unmodified — same script tag, same math as the full app. See the full picture → · Jump to the embed code ↓

For developers

Everything below is for embedding this calculator on your own site — integration code, theming, and events.

Live demos

Default (single, defaults)

Themed (orange accent, household, pre-seeded)

Preview your theme

Pick colors that match your site, then copy the CSS snippet at the bottom.

Theme colors

Accent color Big number, slider thumb, CTA button

#4f8ec9

Card background Outer surface of the calc

#ffffff

Inner surface Result area + toggle background

#f7f9fc

Text color Title, slider values, result subline

#1a1f2e

retirement-calc-aca {
  --rc-accent: #4f8ec9;
  --rc-bg: #ffffff;
  --rc-surf: #f7f9fc;
  --rc-text: #1a1f2e;
}

Integration code

Drop this into your HTML:

<script src="https://app.retirementscenario.com/embed/v1/aca.js"></script>

<retirement-calc-aca></retirement-calc-aca>

Or pre-seed values relevant to your audience:

<retirement-calc-aca
  plan-type="household"
  current-age="55"
  retirement-age="60"
  annual-magi="70000"
  household-size="2">
</retirement-calc-aca>

Attributes

Attribute	Default	Range
`plan-type`	household	`single` or `household`
`current-age`	55	45 – 64 (must be pre-Medicare)
`retirement-age`	60	currentAge – 65 (when ACA coverage starts)
`annual-magi`	70000	0 – 300,000 (Modified Adjusted Gross Income during bridge years, today's $)
`household-size`	2	1 – 6 (drives Federal Poverty Level threshold)
`refsrc`	(none)	partner attribution tag

Theming

Override CSS custom properties on the host:

retirement-calc-aca {
  --rc-accent: #ff6b35;    /* primary color */
  --rc-bg: #ffffff;        /* card background */
  --rc-surf: #f7f9fc;      /* sub-surface (result area) */
  --rc-text: #1a1f2e;
  --rc-muted: #6a7280;
  --rc-border: rgba(20,30,50,0.10);
  --rc-radius: 12px;
}

Events

The element emits two custom events you can listen to:

document.querySelector('retirement-calc-aca')
  .addEventListener('rc-calculated', (e) => {
    console.log('Cliff status:', e.detail.cliffStatus);
    console.log('Annual premium range:', e.detail.annualPremiumLow, '-', e.detail.annualPremiumHigh);
    console.log('Total bridge cost:', e.detail.totalBridgeCostLow, '-', e.detail.totalBridgeCostHigh);

  });

document.querySelector('retirement-calc-aca')
  .addEventListener('rc-cta-clicked', (e) => {
    console.log('User clicked CTA to:', e.detail.url);
  });