How Much Should I Have in My 401(k)?
The on-track balance for your age, computed from the income you want not copied from a salary-multiple rule whose assumptions are never stated.
How this is calculated
Backwards, then forwards. The income you want, less the Social Security and pension income you expect from elsewhere, converts into the pot that pays it at your withdrawal rate, expressed at your retirement date. Then the balance you'd need today is solved by bisection: the starting figure that, growing at your contribution rate and your return, lands exactly on that pot.
The salary multiple falls out at the end.
It's your required balance divided by your salary, printed so you can hold it up against the published rules of thumb, and nothing in the calculation uses it. The statutory caps do apply, every year, at the age you are in that year: §401(a)(17) on the pay that counts, §402(g) and §414(v) on what you're allowed to defer.
Not modelled. Tax of any kind, including the tax on the withdrawals this is all for. Variable returns and sequence-of-returns risk. Career breaks. Any change in the law between now and your retirement, and Congress rewrote large parts of it in 2019 and then again in 2022. Every figure here is pre-tax.
The age multiples are marketing guidance, not research
Ask this question anywhere and you get a table of salary multiples for 401(k)s. One times salary by 30. Three by 40. Six by 50. Eight to ten by the time you stop working.
Large providers publish those tables as guidance, and as a rough sketch they aren't unreasonable. As a standard they're indefensible. Each multiple silently assumes a retirement age, a replacement ratio, a rate of return and a Social Security benefit, and those four numbers vary enormously from person to person. They are almost never printed next to the multiple they produce.
The assumptions stay unpublished because the number sells better without them. Move the retirement age by three years and the whole table shifts. Same for the Social Security assumption. Someone retiring at 62 with no pension and someone retiring at 68 with one do not share a benchmark, however alike their salaries look on paper.
The only benchmark that means anything is your own
So here's a better question, and it has nothing to do with what other people's 401(k)s hold. What would I need by now, given what I want this money to pay me later?
That one is answerable, and the calculator above answers it. It starts from the income you want, takes off the Social Security and pension you expect, works out the pot that produces the rest, then solves backwards for the balance you'd need today to land there at your current contribution rate. The multiple drops out at the end. Watch it swing as you change the inputs, which is the quickest way to see how little authority the published version really has.
That is the question asked backwards, which is the unusual direction to run it. The ordinary one starts from what you hold today and asks where it lands by the time you stop working, and a 401(k) calculator that projects the balance forward answers that instead. Run both. Where the two disagree is where an assumption is doing more work than you realised.
How much should you have at 40, at 50, or at 65?
One sum answers all three, and the only thing that changes between them is how many years are left in it: the income you want, less what Social Security and a pension will cover, grown to your retirement date, divided by your withdrawal rate, then discounted back to the age you are now.
- Work out what the account itself has to produce. The boxes above want $64,000 a year and expect $24,000 from elsewhere, so the gap is $40,000 a year in today's money.
- Grow that gap to your retirement date and divide by your withdrawal rate. $40,000 at 2.5% inflation for 25 years is $74,158, and $74,158 ÷ 4% is $1,853,944. That's the pot you need at 65, in the dollars of that year.
- Take off what your future contributions build by themselves. 8% of an $85,000 salary rising 3% a year, plus a 50% match on the first 6%, compounding at 7%, reaches $806,515 over those 25 years from a standing start. This is the one step a pocket calculator won't do in a single press, because a contribution that rises 3% every year is a growing annuity. Take the first year's total going in, which is your 8% of salary plus the 3% of salary the match adds. Multiply it by (1.0725 − 1.0325) ÷ (0.07 − 0.03). Then multiply by one plus half of 7%, because payroll delivers the money across the year instead of in a lump on 1 January.
- Discount what's left back to today at the same 7%. ($1,853,944 − $806,515) ÷ 1.0725 = $192,988.
So the on-track balance for this particular 40-year-old is $192,988, or 2.3 times salary. Published tables say three times by 40. The difference isn't one of us being wrong: it's the four assumptions the table won't print, sitting here in plain sight where you can argue with them.
Change the age box and nothing about the method changes, only the count of years inside steps two to four. At 50 there are 15 years left instead of 25, so the pot inflates less and the contributions build far less, and the balance you'd need today jumps sharply. That jump is the real answer to "how much should I have saved by 50", and it is why a single table of multiples flatters early savers and punishes late ones.
People skip the third step. Ignore the contributions still to come and you're asking what you'd need if you stopped paying in today, which on these figures is $341,588 instead of $192,988. The other classic mistake is quoting the retirement pot as the age benchmark. $1,853,944 is what a 40-year-old needs at 65. It is not what a 40-year-old should be holding now, and confusing the two is how people decide at 35 that the situation is hopeless.
The median balance describes a filtered population
Worth knowing, if only to calibrate the anxiety.
The Federal Reserve's 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances found that 54.3% of US families held any retirement account at all. Among those that did, the median balance was $86,900 against a mean of $334,000, in 2022 dollars.
Start with the 54.3%. Barely half of American families hold a retirement account of any kind, which means the median balance is the median of the households that already have one. Everybody with nothing has been excluded from the calculation before it starts. That makes it a flattering benchmark and a weak one, and it's the reason I'd rather you compared yourself to your own target than to it.
Then the distance between the two figures. A mean of $334,000 sits close to four times the median, which happens when a small number of very large balances haul the average up. Most articles quote the average anyway, because it's the bigger number and makes the better headline, and readers conclude they're miles behind when they're sitting near the middle.
None of which tells you whether you have enough. A median is a description of a population, never a target. It's perfectly possible to sit well above $86,900 and still be badly short of what your own retirement will cost.
Three levers, and retiring later is the strongest
Three levers exist, and there's no fourth.
- Contribute more. The obvious one and usually the hardest. Raising the rate by a point at every pay rise works because take-home pay never actually falls.
- Retire later. Two extra years buys two more years of contributions, two more years of compounding on the whole balance, and two fewer years of drawdown at the far end.
- Want less. Not defeat. The target you typed in was a guess, and a retirement costing 60% of your current income instead of 75% is a different life, not a failed one.
Anything implying a fourth lever is selling you something.
Retiring later is the one people dismiss and shouldn't, because it moves three things at once, which is why two extra years usually beats several points of contribution rate. It also lets you claim Social Security two years later, which raises that income, and this calculator doesn't count it.
From 50 the §414(v) catch-up allowance lifts your ceiling to $32,500, and through the 60–63 window to $35,750. For a late starter those four years are the most valuable ones on offer. The limits page sets out how the window works and what happens the year after it closes.
Count every account that will fund the retirement, and nothing else
A multiple of salary is an abstraction. What the balance pays a month is the same figure in the units you will actually spend it in, and it is usually the more sobering of the two.
The balance to type in is every account that will pay for your retirement: the current plan, the ones left behind at previous employers, any IRA, and a spouse's accounts if you're planning jointly. Old plans forgotten at former jobs are startlingly common, and usually larger than the person who forgot them remembers.
What shouldn't go in is money already earmarked. A house deposit. A child's education. A Roth IRA you've mentally set aside for something that isn't retirement, whatever the account is technically for. Count those and today's answer looks comfortable. The year you stop working, it won't.
For the forward-looking version of this question, meaning which contribution rate actually gets you there from here, use the contribution planner. For what happens once you start spending the 401(k)s down, the drawdown calculator runs the same arithmetic in reverse.
Frequently asked questions
How much should I have in my 401(k) at my age?
No answer to that exists without knowing what you want the money to do. The published rules of thumb, one times salary by 30 and three by 40 and six by 50, are one provider's guidance resting on unstated assumptions: a retirement age, a rate of return, a Social Security benefit. None of them printed. The calculator above works your figure out from the income you actually want. It shows the salary multiple as an output instead of treating it as the rule.
What is the average 401(k) balance?
The Federal Reserve's 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances found that 54.3% of US families held any retirement account at all, and among those that did the median balance was $86,900 against a mean of $334,000. The gap between the two is the point. A small number of very large balances pull the average far above what a typical household holds, which is why comparing yourself to an average tells you almost nothing useful.
Am I behind on retirement savings?
Behind what you want, possibly. Behind other people, probably less than you fear, since the median retirement account balance of $86,900 is far below the averages quoted in most articles. The useful question isn't where you sit in a distribution. It's whether your current rate reaches your own target, which is what the calculator answers.
Is 1x salary by 30 and 3x by 40 a real rule?
The multiples are guidance published by large providers, not a legal standard and not a research finding. The multiples embed assumptions about retiring in the mid-sixties, a particular replacement ratio, a particular return and a particular Social Security benefit, and those assumptions are rarely stated alongside them. Fine as an opening sketch. Poor as a basis for anything else.
How do I catch up if I am behind?
Only three levers exist: contribute more, retire later, or want less. Working two extra years usually does more than several percentage points of contribution rate, because it adds contributions and growth while taking two years off the drawdown. From 50 the catch-up allowance raises your ceiling to $32,500, and during the 60–63 window to $35,750 under §414(v).
Should I count my employer match and other accounts?
Count everything that will fund your retirement: the 401(k), old plans from previous jobs, any IRA, and a spouse's accounts if you're planning jointly. This calculator already counts the employer match going forward. Don't count money earmarked for something else. That's how people conclude they're on track and then find out at 65, with no time left to fix it, that they weren't.
The balance figures come from one survey, published every three years
Balance statistics on this page come from the Federal Reserve Board, Changes in U.S. Family Finances from 2019 to 2022: Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances, expressed in 2022 dollars. The SCF runs every three years. This is the most recent wave. The next one will move these numbers, and if you're reading this a few years from now it's worth checking whether it already has. It won't change the shape of the distribution behind them.