How Much Do You Actually Need to Retire in India?
There's no universal magic number — but there is a real way to calculate your own, once you stop guessing and start with your actual expenses.
"How much do I need to retire?" gets answered with round numbers like ₹5 crore or ₹10 crore all over the internet — numbers that mean nothing without knowing your actual monthly expenses, how many years your retirement needs to last, and how much inflation erodes that number before you even get there.
Start from your expenses, not a target corpus
The right starting point is your current monthly expenses, not an aspirational corpus figure. From there, the real work is inflating that expense forward to the year you actually retire — a ₹50,000/month lifestyle today is a very different rupee number 25 years from now after inflation.
Your money has to last the whole retirement, not just get you there
A common mistake is planning only for the corpus needed at the day you retire, without accounting for how long that corpus then has to keep funding your life — often 20–30+ years given rising life expectancy. The corpus also needs to keep growing during retirement (typically in safer instruments) to keep pace with ongoing inflation during those decades, not just sit still.
NPS, EPF, and PPF are pieces, not the whole plan
Government-backed retirement instruments are valuable components — EPF and PPF for their tax-free compounding, NPS for its market-linked growth and mandatory annuity — but very few people find these alone add up to their full required corpus. Most realistic retirement plans layer these with additional SIP investments to close the gap.
Do this now
Use the Retirement Planner with your real current monthly expense, a realistic inflation assumption, and how many years you expect to be retired — it will show you both the corpus you actually need and the monthly SIP required today to get there, rather than a generic round number.