Roth IRA Calculator

What Is a Roth IRA?

An IRA is a wrapper, not an investment. What you hold inside it — index funds, individual stocks, bonds, cash — is your choice, and the wrapper decides only when the tax is charged. The Roth version charges it once, at the front door, and never again.

Taxed on the Seed, Not on the Harvest

Money enters a Roth after payroll tax and income tax have already taken their share, so there is no deduction in the year you contribute. In return, a qualified withdrawal comes out whole. The IRS says you may "leave amounts in your Roth IRA as long as you live," which means nothing forces the account open at any age, and nothing recalculates the tax when it closes.

The consequence compounds with the horizon. On $7,000 a year from age 30 to 65 at an assumed 7%, this calculator projects $1,050,615, of which $245,000 is your own deposits and $805,615 is growth. Growth is 76.7% of the ending balance, and it is the part that would otherwise be taxable. The longer the runway, the larger that share gets: at 45 years the growth share is 85.8%, at 10 years it is 30.7%.

That is why the Roth argument gets stronger the younger the saver. It is not that young people earn better returns — it is that the untaxed portion of the balance grows as a fraction of the whole, so the wrapper is protecting more of the total.

What This Calculator Actually Models

One account, one return applied to every month, no withdrawals. The balance you already hold compounds from today to the age you stop contributing. Each year's contribution is divided into twelve equal monthly deposits, and each deposit compounds from the month it lands. Nothing is deducted for fees, taxes or inflation, and no contribution cap is enforced.

There is no market data behind the projection and no opinion about what any portfolio will do. The return is a field you fill in, and the arithmetic is exact only about the consequences of your own assumption. Setting it to 0% collapses the projection to plain addition: 35 years of $7,000 returns exactly $245,000, the deposits and nothing else. Every other answer on this page is that baseline plus compounding.

Read the output as a comparison engine rather than a forecast. The useful question is never "will it be $1,050,615?" — it is how much the answer moves when you change the start age, the contribution or the rate by one notch.

Roth vs Traditional: Where the Tax Falls

Both accounts shelter growth from annual taxation. They differ only in which end pays. A traditional IRA deducts the contribution now and taxes the whole withdrawal later as ordinary income; a Roth does the reverse. Take the projected $1,050,615 above: from a traditional account at an assumed 22% marginal rate in retirement, $231,135 goes to tax and $819,480 is spendable, while the Roth balance is spendable in full.

That comparison is not the whole argument, and pages that stop there are cheating. The traditional saver also received a deduction in every contribution year, and if that refund is itself invested the two accounts are mathematically identical whenever the tax rate at contribution equals the rate at withdrawal. The Roth wins when your future rate is higher, the traditional wins when it is lower, and a genuine third advantage sits underneath: a dollar inside a Roth is a dollar of after-tax money, while a dollar inside a traditional account still owes income tax on the way out, so the same contribution limit shelters more real value in the Roth.

A workplace plan with an employer match usually outranks both accounts in funding order, because matched money is a return no assumption can compete with — size it with the 401k Calculator.

Nobody knows their retirement bracket thirty years out, which is why splitting contributions between the two is a defensible answer rather than a fence-sit. Tax diversification costs nothing and removes the need to be right.

How Do You Calculate Roth IRA Growth?

Two standard pieces of future-value arithmetic added together. The first grows whatever is already in the account. The second grows a stream of equal monthly deposits, each for the months it was actually invested. The tax treatment changes nothing in the math — it changes what the answer is worth.

The Roth IRA Formula, Written Out

One line does the projection; the second line is what makes the number a Roth number rather than a brokerage number:

FV = B × (1 + r)ⁿ  +  PMT × [ (1 + r)ⁿ − 1 ] ÷ r

Growth = FV − (B + annual contribution × years)

B   = balance already in the account
PMT = annual contribution ÷ 12          ($7,000/yr → $583.33/month)
r   = assumed annual return ÷ 12        (7% → 0.07 ÷ 12 = 0.00583333)
n   = months until contributions stop   (age 30 to 65 → 420)

Tax on a qualified withdrawal: $0 on the contributions AND $0 on the growth

The second term is the future value of an ordinary annuity — a finite geometric series with common ratio (1 + r), which is why 420 separate deposit calculations collapse into a single fraction. "Ordinary" means each deposit lands at the end of its month, so the first $583.33 earns 419 months of growth rather than 420. That convention alone is worth $6,129 on the default run against a tool that deposits at the start of each month.

If the assumed return is 0% the fraction would divide by zero, so the calculation switches to:

FV = B + (PMT × n)

Note what the formula does not contain: no tax term, no fee term, no contribution ceiling. The tax advantage is not applied to the balance — it is the absence of a deduction from it, which is precisely why the growth figure is reported separately.

Step by Step

Working the default run by hand — age 30, contributions stopping at 65, $7,000 a year, nothing in the account yet, 7% assumed:

• Count the months: (65 − 30) × 12 = 420.
• Split the annual contribution across the year: $7,000 ÷ 12 = $583.33 a month.
• Convert the return to a monthly rate: 7 ÷ 1200 = 0.00583333.
• Raise it to the 420th power for the growth factor: 1.00583333^420 = 11.506152.
• Grow the opening balance: $0 × 11.506152 = $0.
• Grow the deposits: $583.33 × (11.506152 − 1) ÷ 0.00583333 = $1,050,615.
• Add the two halves: $0 + $1,050,615 = $1,050,615.
• Subtract what you paid in: $1,050,615 − (35 × $7,000) = $805,615 of growth.
• Apply the tax rule: on a qualified withdrawal, $0 is owed on the $245,000 and $0 on the $805,615.

The exponent has to be applied before anything is multiplied or subtracted, and the tool rounds only at the very end. Rounding the growth factor to three decimals early lands you tens of dollars off — close enough to check the method, not close enough to quote.

Worked Example: $7,000 a Year from 30 to 65

The balance field arrives pre-filled at 0, so this run needs the two ages, the contribution and the rate typed in:

Inputs: age 30 · contributions stop at 65 · $7,000/yr · $0 opening balance · 7%/yr assumed

$1,050,615 tax-free — contributions $245,000 + growth $805,615

The decomposition is where the example earns its keep. You supply $245,000 across 420 deposits; compounding supplies $805,615, or 76.7% of the ending balance. In a taxable brokerage account that growth is what gets taxed — at an assumed 15% long-term capital gains rate it would carry $120,842 at the end, and more than that in practice, because dividends are taxed in the years they are paid rather than deferred to the sale.

Change one input and the leverage of an opening balance shows up immediately. Enter $25,000 in the balance field and the same run returns $1,338,269. That $25,000 became $287,654 on its own — an 11.51× multiple, exactly the growth factor from step 4 — because unlike the contributions it compounded for all 420 months rather than an average of half that. Money already inside the wrapper is the most valuable money in the projection.

Using This Roth IRA Calculator

Five fields, no sign-up, nothing stored. Four of them are yours to type and one arrives pre-filled at zero, because a projection with a hardcoded age is a projection of somebody else's retirement.

The Five Inputs

• Current Age — your age today, accepted from 15 to 80. Decimals count: entering 30.5 runs a 34.5-year projection and returns $1,011,153 instead of $1,050,615.
• Retirement Age — strictly later than your current age and no higher than 80. Read it as the age contributions stop, not the age you leave work; the projection has no drawdown phase, so anything you plan to leave invested afterward keeps compounding beyond this figure.
• Annual Contribution ($/yr) — the yearly amount, not the monthly one. It is accepted above 0 and up to $50,000, then divided internally into twelve equal deposits. If you save monthly, multiply by 12 before typing.
• Current Balance ($) — whatever the Roth already holds. This is a text field with a default of 0, and every character that is not a digit or a decimal point is stripped, so "$25,000" and "25000" both read as $25,000.
• Assumed Annual Return (%/yr) — your planning assumption, entered as a percentage between 0 and 30. Type 7, not 0.07.

There is no field for your income, filing status, marginal tax rate or employer plan, and none for a conversion. The tool answers one question — what does this balance become — and everything tax-related lives in how you read the answer rather than in the arithmetic.

The Limits the Tool Enforces

Four checks run before any math, and each returns a plain instruction where the balance would appear:

• A current age below 15 or above 80 — "Enter your current age". Fifteen is not a legal minimum for owning an IRA; there is no age floor in the tax code, only a requirement to have earned income. It is simply the bottom of this tool's range.
• A retirement age at or before your current age, or above 80 — "Retirement age must be after your current age". One message covers both mistakes.
• A contribution of 0 or above $50,000 — "Enter your annual contribution". The ceiling is a sanity bound on the arithmetic, not a legal limit; the real IRS cap is far lower and is not checked here.
• A return below 0 or above 30 — "Enter an assumed return (0–30%)". Zero is legal and useful, since it strips compounding out and shows the deposits alone.

The 30% ceiling exists because past it the output stops informing any decision. At the maximum, 35 years of $7,000 projects $744,709,069, which is arithmetic rather than planning.

What It Deliberately Leaves Out

No contribution cap, no income phase-out, no catch-up bump at 50, no inflation, no fees, no conversion modeling. Each was left out for the same reason: including it would mean hardcoding a figure the IRS revises most years, and a calculator that quietly assumes last year's limit is wrong every January without telling anyone.

Most of them can still be modeled by adjusting what you type. Subtract fund and platform costs from the assumed return — a 0.5% expense ratio means entering 6.5% rather than 7%. Subtract expected inflation from the return to work in today's dollars. If you turn 50 partway through the horizon and start making catch-up contributions, run the two phases separately and carry the first phase's ending balance into the second run's balance field.

To convert a projected balance back into today's purchasing power without doing the exponent by hand, use the Inflation Calculator.

How to Read Your Result

The output is four lines, and each answers a different question — the balance, the inputs behind it, the split that carries the tax break, and what the same growth would have cost elsewhere.

Line by Line

• "$1,050,615 tax-free" — the projected balance at the age contributions stop, in future dollars, with no tax due on a qualified withdrawal.
• "35 years of $7,000/yr at 7% on top of $0" — your inputs echoed back, so a screenshot is still interpretable a month later.
• "Contributions $245,000 + growth $805,615 — qualified withdrawals owe $0 tax on all of it" — the split, and the claim that depends on it. The first figure is arithmetic you control; the second is the consequence of your rate assumption.
• A closing line pricing the growth against a taxable account, plus the reminder that IRS contribution limits apply and change yearly.

If an amber "Check your inputs" notice replaces those four lines, an input failed validation and the sentence inside the notice names the field. Read it as an instruction rather than as a result — the tool never returns a balance of zero for a plan that has money going into it.

The Growth Line Is the One That Carries the Tax Break

Contributions are money you already had. Growth is the part that would have been taxed somewhere else, so the growth figure is the closest thing to a price tag on the wrapper. Across the default run it is $805,615 against $245,000 paid in — the sheltered part is 3.3 times the deposits, and that multiple, rather than the balance, is what a longer horizon really buys.

This is also the honest way to compare accounts. Against a taxable brokerage the Roth saves tax on the growth alone — $120,842 at an assumed 15% long-term capital gains rate here, before counting the annual drag of taxed dividends. Against a traditional IRA it saves tax on the entire balance, since every dollar of a traditional withdrawal is ordinary income: $231,135 at an assumed 22% rate, or $252,148 at 24%.

Both comparisons use rates you have to supply yourself, and neither is a prediction of your bracket in retirement. They are there to show which part of the balance each account type actually taxes.

The Balance Is in Future Dollars

A projection of $1,050,615 in 35 years is not $1,050,615 of today's groceries. There are two defensible corrections, and they answer different questions:

• Deflate the answer. Divide by (1 + inflation) raised to the years. At 3% over 35 years the factor is 2.8139, turning $1,050,615 into about $373,371 of today's purchasing power; at 2% the factor is 1.9999 and the figure is $525,337. This version assumes your $7,000 contribution stays $7,000 forever, losing real value every year.
• Run the tool at a real return instead. Subtract expected inflation from your nominal assumption — 7% minus 3% gives 4% — and the same plan projects $533,010, already in today's money. That version quietly assumes you raise the contribution with inflation each year, which is roughly what happens if you keep pace with the IRS limit as it is adjusted.

Neither is wrong; they model different behavior, which is why they differ by $159,639 on identical inputs. The genuine error is mixing conventions — projecting a nominal balance and then comparing its income to what you spend this year.

To turn a projected balance into a yearly retirement income and test it against a retirement date, run the numbers through the Retirement Calculator.

Converted into spending, the default balance supports roughly $42,025 in the first year under the common 4% guideline, about $3,502 a month. The Roth twist is that this figure needs no tax haircut, while the same withdrawal from a traditional account would be taxed as income.

Roth IRA Chart: Start Age, Contribution and Return

Every row below is this calculator's own output. The first chart holds the contribution at $7,000 a year and the return at 7%, stops contributions at 65, and moves only the age you begin.

Compare two five-year stretches of the same size. Starting at 25 rather than 30 costs $35,000 of extra deposits and adds $480,526 to the balance; starting at 45 rather than 50 costs the identical $35,000 and adds $118,979. The dollar is the same, the account is the same, and the early one does four times the work — which is the entire case for opening the account before you feel ready to fund it properly.

The Same 35 Years at Different Contribution Levels

Age 30 to 65 at 7% from a zero balance. Only the yearly amount changes:

The table is exactly linear, and the first row is the proof: every $1,000 of annual contribution is worth $150,088 at 65, so the gap between the $6,000 and $7,000 rows is $150,088 to the dollar. Growth is 76.7% of the balance in every single row. There is no threshold you must clear before compounding starts working, and no bonus for maxing out — the wrapper treats the first $1,000 exactly like the last.

The Same Plan at Different Assumed Returns

Age 30 to 65, $7,000 a year, nothing to start. The deposits are $245,000 in every row; only the assumption moves:

One percentage point between 6% and 7% is worth $219,534 here; between 7% and 8% it is worth $287,483. Over 35 years the assumption moves the answer more than the saving does, which is the strongest possible argument for subtracting fund and platform costs before you type the rate. A single point of annual cost is the difference between two adjacent rows.

Contributing for Longer

Starting at 30 with $7,000 a year at 7%, moving only the age the contributions stop:

Two years past 65 adds $172,369 on $14,000 of deposits; five years adds $480,526 on $35,000. Notice the symmetry with the start-age table: a 40-year horizon returns $1,531,141 whether you buy it by starting at 25 or by contributing until 70, because with no opening balance the model only counts the number of years, not which end they came from. That symmetry is exactly why the early years feel free and the late ones do not — they cost the same, but only one set is still available to you.

Roth IRA Examples

Six real plans at different ages, balances and assumptions, each run through this calculator. The column to watch is the last one against the third — how much of each outcome the saver actually paid for.

The first and last rows carry the lesson. The 16-year-old paying in $98,000 of summer-job money ends with $844,871 — more growth, in dollars, than the 45-year-old's entire ending balance — while the late starter commits $234,000 and finishes at $617,122. Time did the work in the first case and money had to do it in the second.

What a One-Year Delay Costs

Take the default plan and move only the start age. Beginning at 30 projects $1,050,615; beginning at 31 projects $973,045. The year of hesitation skipped $7,000 of deposits and removed $77,570 from the balance — $11.08 of ending balance for every dollar not contributed. Stretch the delay to five years and the projection falls to $711,650, a loss of $338,965 on $35,000 of skipped deposits.

The rate falls fast as the horizon shortens, which is the point. Delaying one year at 30 costs $77,570; the identical decision at 40 costs $38,599, at 50 costs $19,207, and at 60 costs $9,557 — from $11.08 per skipped dollar down to $1.37. Hesitation is expensive out of all proportion to the money involved, and only at the start.

Two Accounts in One Household

An IRA belongs to one person — there is no joint version — so a couple funding two accounts is running this calculator twice, or once at double the contribution. At $14,000 a year from 30 to 65 at 7% the projection is $2,101,230 on $490,000 of deposits, with $1,611,230 of growth. Every figure is exactly twice the single-account run, because the arithmetic is linear in the contribution.

The detail worth knowing is that a spouse with little or no earned income can still have an account funded on the strength of the working spouse's compensation, provided the couple files jointly. Publication 590-A sets out the conditions; the calculator simply treats it as another account with its own deposits.

The Rules That Make the Result Tax-Free

The headline says "tax-free," and that claim is conditional. Four IRS rules decide whether the projection you are looking at is really untaxed money, and none of them appear in the arithmetic.

Age 59½ and the Five-Year Clock

A withdrawal is qualified — meaning the growth comes out untaxed and unpenalized — when two conditions are both met: you are at least 59½, and five tax years have passed since your first contribution to any Roth IRA. Publication 590-B sets out the test in full, and the second half is the one people miss. The clock runs on the account, not on the money, so a 58-year-old opening a first Roth is still inside the five-year window at 60.

For the pure growth question with no retirement age attached — any horizon, any starting sum — the simpler tool is the Compound Interest Calculator.

The practical move costs almost nothing: open a Roth early, even with a token amount, purely to start the clock. A $100 account opened at 25 makes every dollar contributed at 61 immediately eligible, while a first account opened at 61 does not.

Taking Money Out Early

Roth withdrawals come out in a fixed order: contributions first, then converted amounts, then growth. Because your contributions were already taxed, that first layer can be withdrawn at any age without tax or penalty — the feature that lets a Roth double as a deep emergency reserve. On the default run that layer reaches $245,000 by 65, and it is accessible the whole way there.

Growth is the layer with conditions. Withdrawn before the account qualifies, it is generally taxable and carries what the IRS calls an "additional 10% early withdrawal tax unless an exception applies." The published exceptions include total and permanent disability, qualified higher education expenses, unreimbursed medical costs above 7.5% of adjusted gross income, and a first home — the last capped at $10,000 over a lifetime, not per purchase.

Treating the contribution layer as an emergency fund has a real cost the calculator will not show you: withdrawn contributions cannot be put back beyond that year's limit, so the compounding they would have done is gone permanently. Removing one year of contributions at 30 — $7,000 — takes $77,570 off the age-65 projection at 7%.

Contribution Limits and Income Phase-Outs

The annual cap is a single ceiling shared across all your IRAs, not a per-account allowance: the IRS states that "the total contributions you make each year to all of your traditional IRAs and Roth IRAs" cannot exceed the published limit, with a higher figure from age 50. For 2026 the IRS sets that ceiling at $7,500, or $8,600 from age 50, up from $7,000 and $8,000 in 2025. The figures are revised most years, so the calculator deliberately does not enforce them, and the default run used throughout this page — a round $7,000 a year — sits a little under the current ceiling rather than stating it.

A second gate applies to higher earners. Publication 590-A describes a phase-out band based on modified adjusted gross income and filing status: below the band you may contribute in full, inside it your limit is reduced, and above it direct contributions are not permitted at all. The thresholds move annually, so treat the linked source as the only current figure.

Above the band, the standard workaround is a nondeductible traditional contribution followed by a conversion to Roth. It is routine and legal, with one trap that catches people every year: existing pre-tax IRA balances are aggregated when a conversion is taxed, so the conversion is only partly tax-free. Significant pre-tax balances usually warrant a conversation with a tax professional before the transfer, not after.

No Required Withdrawals for the Owner

The IRS is explicit that "withdrawals from Roth IRAs and Designated Roth accounts (401(k) or 403(b)) are not required until after the death of the account owner," against age 73 for traditional IRAs and workplace plans. This is the one structural advantage that has nothing to do with tax rates: a Roth can be left untouched for life, compounding past the age a traditional account would be forced to distribute.

To see the size of the withdrawal a traditional balance would be forced to make each year, and what the Roth is avoiding, use the RMD Calculator.

For anyone whose retirement income is already covered by other sources, that alone can settle the Roth-versus-traditional question, because a forced distribution from a traditional account is taxable whether or not you needed the money.

Limits: When This Projection Does Not Apply

Four places where the number on screen is not the number you will live with. None of them make the tool useless; all of them change how much weight the output deserves.

Flat Contributions for Decades

Every year gets the identical deposit for the whole horizon, which no real saving career produces. Raises, career breaks, a year the money went to a house deposit, and the IRS limit itself being adjusted upward — none of it is modeled. If your contribution grows with your income the projection understates the outcome substantially: escalating that $7,000 by 3% a year lifts the default run from $1,050,615 to $1,485,848 on $423,235 of deposits.

The workaround costs one extra run per change. Project the first phase, carry its ending balance into the second run's balance field, and continue. It removes the least realistic assumption in the model without pretending the tool has fields it does not have.

A Smooth Return That No Market Delivers

The same rate is applied to all 420 months, so the projection contains no losing years at all. The SEC's Investor.gov puts the reality plainly: "Large company stocks as a group, have lost money on average about one out of every three years." That volatility does not change the arithmetic during accumulation — nothing is being withdrawn, so the order of returns barely matters — but it does mean the single figure on screen is the middle of a wide distribution rather than a destination.

Run your own plan at three rates and treat the spread as your uncertainty. For age 30 to 65 at $7,000 a year that is $662,721 at 5%, $1,050,615 at 7% and $1,716,041 at 9%. A decision that still works at the bottom of your range is a decision; one that only works at the top is a hope.

Why Another Calculator Gives a Different Answer

Compounding conventions explain most gaps. This tool compounds monthly and places each deposit at the end of its month. A calculator that deposits at the start of each month returns $1,056,744 on identical inputs, $6,129 more. One that compounds annually with a single $7,000 deposit at year end returns $967,658 — $82,957 less — and the same annual model with the deposit at the start of the year returns $1,035,394.

All three gaps are small next to the difference between assuming 6% and 7%, which is $219,534 on the same plan. If two calculators disagree by a few percent, check the compounding convention. If they disagree by a third, check the return assumption — that is where the disagreement almost always lives.

The Hard Edges

Ages run from 15 to 80, contributions from just above $0 to $50,000, returns from 0% to 30%, and the retirement age must be strictly later than the current age. Anything outside those returns an instruction rather than a number. The balance field strips every character that is not a digit or a decimal point, so a minus sign silently disappears and −5000 is read as a $5,000 opening balance — this tool models accumulation only and has no withdrawal mode.

For the same growth arithmetic applied to a taxable account, so you can price what the Roth wrapper is actually worth, run the Investment Calculator.

It also assumes contributions continue uninterrupted to the age you enter, that compounding is monthly, and that nothing is taken out along the way. All three are conventions rather than claims, all three are stated here, and all three are worth knowing when a different tool hands you a different answer on identical inputs.