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Roth IRA Calculator

↻ Updated 2026

See how your Roth IRA could grow into a tax-free nest egg — using the 2026 contribution limit, your time horizon and expected returns. Everything runs in your browser.

Educational calculators — always consult a licensed professional before making financial decisions.

Your inputs

Annual contribution

2026 IRA limit: $7,500 ($8,600 at 50+)

Current age

Retirement age

Current Roth balance

Expected annual return

Tax-free at 65

$1,216,117

in 35 years

You contributed

$272,500

total paid in

Tax-free growth

$943,617

never taxed again

Roth IRA growth to retirementtarget age 65

age 30age 65

Contributions vs tax-free growth

Total contributed$272,500

Tax-free growth$943,617

ASSUMPTIONS — Contributions are capped at the 2026 IRA limit of $7,500 ($8,600 with the age-50 catch-up) and made at the start of each year. Roth contributions are after-tax, so qualified withdrawals — including all growth — are entirely tax-free. Returns are assumed constant; real markets vary. Income limits may reduce or bar Roth eligibility.

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How to read your Roth IRA projection

The headline is the only balance on this site that needs no asterisk: qualified Roth withdrawals are tax-free, so $1.2M means $1.2M. The number worth staring at is the split underneath — at the defaults you contribute $272,500 and end with $1,216,117. The other $943,617 is growth the IRS never touches.

Growth is 78% of the ending balance at the defaults. The Roth's advantage isn't the deduction it doesn't give you — it's that the largest part of the account is the part that's never taxed.

Drag your current age from 30 to 40 and the balance falls from $1.22M to $562,000 — losing ten years costs more than half the account. Compare the pre-tax route with the traditional vs Roth calculator.

The return is nominal. At 3% inflation, $1,216,117 in 2061 buys roughly what $432,000 buys today — still tax-free, just smaller than it looks.

How your tax-free Roth IRA balance is calculated

This is a future-value calculation with contributions made at the start of each year. Your existing balance compounds for the whole horizon; each annual contribution compounds for however many years remain after it lands.

Because the contributions arrive at the start of the year rather than the end, each one earns a full year of return in the year it's made. That's the annuity-due form of the formula — the (1 + return) multiplier on the contribution term is doing exactly that.

years = retirement age − current age growth = (1 + return) ^ years balance = starting balance × growth + contribution × ((growth − 1) ÷ return) × (1 + return) you contributed = starting balance + contribution × years tax-free growth = balance − you contributed

contribution: What you put in each year, in after-tax dollars — capped at the 2026 IRA limit of $7,500, or $8,600 from the year you turn 50
starting balance: What your Roth IRA holds today — compounds for the full horizon, which is why it punches above its weight
return: Expected annual return, nominal — inflation is not removed — the answer is in future dollars
years: Time until you retire — the exponent, which is why it moves the answer more than any other input
growth: The compounding factor over the whole horizon — 1.07 ^ 35 = 10.68 at the defaults
balance: The projected account value at retirement — tax-free on withdrawal if the distribution is qualified — see the 5-year rule FAQ

The $7,500 limit is the calculator's slider maximum, and it's a per-person, per-year ceiling across all your IRAs combined — traditional and Roth together, not $7,500 each. The model also assumes you contribute every single year for the whole horizon, which is the assumption most likely to be wrong. It applies no income test either: Roth eligibility phases out at higher incomes, and this tool will happily project a balance you may not be allowed to build. For the workplace equivalent, see the 401(k) calculator.

Worked examples

Example: a 30-year-old maxing out at $7,500 a year

The calculator's defaults — a $10,000 balance today, the full 2026 limit contributed at the start of every year, a 7% return, run to age 65.

Years of compoundingage 30 to 65	35
Compounding factor1.07 ^ 35	10.68×
Year 1 balance($10,000 + $7,500) × 1.07	$18,725
Total contributed$10,000 + $7,500 × 35	$272,500
Tax-free growth78% of the ending balance	$943,617
Balance at 65entirely tax-free if qualified	$1,216,117

$1.22M from $272,500 of contributions. The $10,000 you start with becomes $106,800 on its own — it compounds for all 35 years, while the contribution you make in year 34 gets one. That asymmetry is the whole argument for starting early, stated in dollars.

Example: the same person starts at 40 instead of 30

Identical in every other respect: $10,000 today, $7,500 a year, 7% return, retiring at 65. Ten fewer years of contributions — and, more to the point, ten fewer years of compounding on all of them.

Years of compoundingdown from 35	25
Total contributeddown $75,000 — you skipped 10 contributions	$197,500
Tax-free growthdown $579,269	$364,348
Balance at 65down $654,269	$561,848
Lost balance per skipped dollar$654,269 ÷ $75,000	$8.72

$75,000 of skipped contributions cost $654,269 of balance — nearly nine dollars gone for every dollar not contributed. The ending balance falls 54% while contributions fall only 28%, because the years you lose are the front ones, and those are the years every later dollar was going to compound through.

Frequently asked questions

Can I contribute to a Roth IRA if I make too much money?

Above a certain modified AGI you can't contribute directly at all, and there's a phase-out range below that where you can contribute a reduced amount. The thresholds are set each year by the IRS and published in Notice 2025-67 for 2026; they differ by filing status. This calculator applies no income test — it will project a balance regardless of what you earn, so check your eligibility before trusting the number.

The well-documented workaround is a backdoor Roth: contribute to a traditional IRA, which has no income limit on contributions, then convert. It's a two-step version of what the Roth conversion calculator models, and it collides with the pro-rata rule if you hold any other pre-tax IRA money.

Can I withdraw my Roth IRA contributions at any time?

Your contributions, yes — at any age, for any reason, with no tax and no penalty. You already paid tax on those dollars, and the IRS ordering rules treat contributions as the first thing out of the account. That makes a Roth IRA unusually flexible for a retirement account.

Earnings are the different story. Pull those out before 59½ or before the account has satisfied the 5-year rule and you're generally looking at income tax plus a 10% penalty, with a short list of exceptions (IRS Publication 590-B). At the defaults, $272,500 of the ending balance is contributions and $943,617 is earnings — so the flexible portion is under a quarter of the account, and it shrinks as a share every year you leave it alone.

What is the Roth IRA 5-year rule?

Five tax years must pass from your first contribution to any Roth IRA before earnings can come out tax-free. The clock starts on January 1 of the tax year of that first contribution — so a contribution made in April 2026 for tax year 2026 starts the clock on 1 January 2026, not on the day you funded it. It runs once, for all your Roth IRAs; you don't restart it with each new account.

There's a second, separate 5-year rule for conversions, and each conversion gets its own clock. Confusing the two is the common mistake. Both are set out in IRS Publication 590-B. A qualified distribution needs the 5-year rule satisfied and one of the qualifying conditions met — usually being 59½ or older.

Should I max out my Roth IRA or my 401(k) first?

The order most large recordkeepers publish — Fidelity, Schwab and Vanguard converge here — is: contribute enough to your 401(k) to capture the full employer match, then fund the Roth IRA, then go back to the 401(k). The logic is that the match is an immediate guaranteed return no market can promise, so it comes first regardless of account type. The employer match calculator shows what that first step is worth on your salary.

After the match the comparison is genuinely about tax rates, not accounts. A Roth IRA costs you tax today and owes none later; a traditional 401(k) is the reverse. The limits differ too — $7,500 to an IRA versus $24,500 of 401(k) deferrals for 2026 — so for a high saver the question resolves itself once the IRA is full.

What this Roth IRA calculator assumes away

The projection is a clean compounding curve. Reality has rules attached to it, and this model ignores most of them.

Your eligibility to contribute — No income test is applied. Roth contributions phase out above a modified-AGI threshold that varies by filing status, and the calculator doesn't know or ask. If you're over the line, the projected balance is one you'd have to reach by a different route.
Contributing every single year — The model assumes 35 uninterrupted contributions at the full limit. A gap year, a lean year or a year you forget all reduce the answer, and the earlier the gap, the more it costs — the second example puts that price at $8.72 of balance per skipped dollar.
A limit that never rises — The $7,500 cap is held flat for the whole projection. The IRS indexes it to inflation and it has risen repeatedly, so a real 35-year contributor would put in more than $262,500. This makes the projection conservative on contributions and optimistic on their purchasing power at once.
Nominal returns — A 7% return with no inflation adjustment puts the answer in 2061 dollars. Tax-free is not inflation-free.
The 5-year rule and qualified distributions — The balance is labelled tax-free, which is true only for qualified distributions. Earnings withdrawn before the 5-year rule is met, or before 59½ without an exception, are taxed and penalised (IRS Publication 590-B).