Retirement planning is where all the separate pieces of your pension life come together — the workplace pension you've been auto-enrolled into, any personal pensions you've opened along the way, and the state pension you'll eventually be entitled to — and turns them into an actual plan for the income you'll live on once you stop working. It's less about any single decision and more about four connected questions: how much you need to save, how you'll turn savings into a reliable income, how you keep track of everything you've built up, and how you translate all of it into numbers you can actually plan around.
The first and most fundamental question is how much to save for retirement. There's no single right answer, but there are two well-established ways to approach it: comparing your target lifestyle against the PLSA Retirement Living Standards, which describe what a minimum, moderate, or comfortable retirement actually looks like day to day, or checking your progress against common age-based savings benchmarks, such as aiming for roughly six times your salary saved by age 50. Either approach turns a vague ambition into a number you can measure yourself against.
Once you have a savings target, the next question is what happens when you actually stop working — this is retirement income strategy. Modern pension freedoms mean you're rarely locked into a single option: you can draw your pension flexibly, buy a guaranteed income through an annuity, take a mix of both, or phase your retirement gradually rather than stopping all at once. Each route carries different trade-offs around flexibility, guaranteed income, investment risk, and tax, and the right combination depends heavily on your other savings, your health, and how much certainty matters to you.
Keeping track of what you've actually got is a surprisingly common stumbling block. Many people accumulate several pensions over a career — a workplace scheme with one employer, then another with the next, perhaps a personal pension alongside them — and lose track of some along the way. The pension dashboard initiative is designed to solve exactly this problem, aiming to let you see all your pensions, including the state pension, in a single place, making it far easier to get an accurate picture of your total retirement income before you need to make any decisions.
Finally, a retirement calculator turns all of the above into concrete numbers specific to your situation: your projected pot size at a chosen retirement age, an estimate of the income that pot might generate, and how that compares against your target. Used well, a calculator isn't a one-off exercise but something you revisit periodically as your circumstances, contributions, and goals change.
Whichever of these four areas is most relevant to you right now, the guides below go into each one in depth, written in plain English and free of unnecessary jargon. None of this constitutes personal financial advice, and for guidance tailored to your specific circumstances, the free, independent MoneyHelper service or a regulated financial adviser are always worth considering alongside anything you read here.
