Fidelity, Vanguard & the free retirement calculators

Fidelity’s Retirement Score

Fidelity’s score is the fastest honest answer in this category. A handful of questions — age, income, savings, contribution rate, how you’re invested — and you get a single number representing how much of your estimated retirement expenses your plan could cover.

The methodology detail most people miss is the one that matters most. Fidelity runs a minimum of 250 hypothetical market scenarios and reports your score at the 90% confidence level — what their documentation calls a “significantly below average market,” where only 10 out of 100 simulated scenarios performed worse. In other words, the score is deliberately measured in a bad market. That is a genuinely conservative and defensible choice, and it explains why Fidelity often looks gloomier than a tool reporting an average outcome. It isn’t disagreeing with them. It’s standing somewhere else on the same distribution.

Where it stops: the score compresses everything into one figure, which makes it easy to read and hard to interrogate. You can’t see which assumption is driving it, and you can’t ask it what changes if you retire two years earlier, convert to Roth in your sixties, or move to a state that doesn’t tax pensions. It’s a thermometer, not a diagnosis.

Vanguard’s Retirement Income Calculator

Vanguard’s tool takes your savings, income, retirement age and a Social Security estimate, and shows the monthly income your plan is on course to produce. It is refreshingly clear about how it gets there, and its own assumption text is worth quoting: it assumes “you can afford to spend approximately 4% of your initial nest egg each year in retirement,” applies “an annual inflation rate of 3%,” and presents results in today’s pre-tax dollars.

Those three lines tell you exactly what you have and haven’t been given. You have a clean 4%-rule projection with a Social Security estimate layered on — a good napkin number, and Vanguard doesn’t pretend it is more than that.

Where it stops: a fixed 4% withdrawal is a rule of thumb built on 30-year retirements, not a simulation of your particular sequence of returns — we wrote about where the 4% rule came from and when it breaks. And pre-tax dollars is the phrase to sit with: if most of your money is in a 401(k) or traditional IRA, the number on that screen is not the number that reaches your checking account. The gap is your tax bill, and nobody has modeled it yet.

A free calculator that tells you its assumptions is doing its job. The mistake is treating its answer as the plan rather than the prompt.

What every quick calculator leaves out

This isn’t a flaw in Fidelity’s or Vanguard’s work — a six-question tool cannot ask about your ACA subsidy without becoming a sixty-question tool. But if you’re between 55 and 70, the omitted layer is where most of your controllable money is:

The incentive worth naming

Fidelity and Vanguard are among the most trusted names in the business, and Vanguard is famously owned by its own funds. Neither tool is trying to trick anyone. But it’s still worth saying out loud that a retirement calculator built by a firm that custodies assets sits inside a business that benefits when you consolidate accounts there and, at some asset level, when you take their advisory service. That doesn’t make the math wrong — it does explain why these tools stay simple and cheerful about “next steps.”

We have no assets under management and no advisory arm. The software is the whole business, which is a different bias — not the absence of one — and it’s the reason our free tier runs the complete engine rather than a stripped-down preview.

Head to head

Based on each tool’s published methodology and assumption disclosures, verified July 2026. If we’ve mischaracterized anything, tell us and we’ll correct it.

What we’d actually suggest

Use the free ones exactly as they’re meant to be used. Fidelity’s score in three minutes tells you whether this is urgent. Vanguard’s calculator gives you a napkin income figure you can sanity-check against your spending. Neither will mislead you if you read what they say about themselves.

Then, when the answer is “close enough that the details matter” — which is most people in their fifties — run the same numbers somewhere that models the tax layer. Ours is free for that too, with no account and nothing to link, and it will tell you plainly where it disagrees with the quick answer and why. If the numbers come out different, that gap is almost always one of five nameable assumptions.

Common questions