Every retirement account is a bargain with the tax code; the Roth IRA is simply the version where you pay the toll at the entrance instead of the exit. Contributions go in with money you have already paid tax on. From that moment, the account's growth is never taxed again — not year by year as it compounds, and not when you take the money out in retirement, provided the withdrawal is qualified. For a young saver, that structure is close to magic, because the largest part of a lifetime Roth balance is not the contributions at all. It is the earnings, and every dollar of those earnings can legally arrive in retirement completely tax-free. This calculator projects that split for your own numbers: how much you will have put in, how much the account will have earned, and the total the two build together.

How the money actually moves.

You contribute after-tax dollars, up to an annual limit, into an account you open at a brokerage, bank, or robo-advisor, and you choose the investments — index funds are the common default. There is no tax deduction for contributing, which is the part people fixate on, and no tax bill of any kind while the money grows. Two different buckets live inside the account, and keeping them straight explains almost every Roth rule. The first bucket is your contributions themselves. Because you already paid tax on that money, the IRS lets you withdraw your contributions at any age, at any time, without tax or penalty — a flexibility no other retirement account offers, though raiding the account still forfeits the compounding that made it valuable. The second bucket is the earnings. Earnings follow stricter rules: they become fully tax-free only when a withdrawal is qualified, which generally means the account has satisfied the five-year rule and you are at least 59 and a half, with a few statutory exceptions described below. Withdraw earnings early and they are generally taxed, with a possible additional penalty on top.

The math, and the assumption printed on the tin.

This calculator grows your current balance for the full period at your expected return, and grows your contributions as an ordinary annuity — one contribution at the end of each year. That timing choice is deliberately conservative: money contributed in January compounds for almost a full extra year compared with money contributed in December, so real savers who contribute monthly or early in the year will typically land somewhat ahead of this projection, all else equal. The formula for the contribution stream is the standard future value of an annuity: each year's contribution is multiplied by the compounding factor for the years it spends invested, and the results are summed. Nothing exotic — but the output routinely startles people, because over a 35-year horizon at stock-market-like returns, the earnings do not just match the contributions. They bury them.

A worked example, dollar by dollar.

Take this calculator's standard case. You are 30, retiring at 65, starting from zero, contributing $7,000 a year — the widely published 2025 annual limit for savers under 50 — at an expected return of 8 percent. That is 35 contributions totaling $245,000 of your own money. Compounded at 8 percent with a contribution at each year-end, the contribution stream grows to $1,206,218, rounded to the nearest dollar. Total contributions: $245,000. Total earnings: $961,218. Read that split slowly. For every dollar this saver puts in, the account generates roughly four more, and if the withdrawals in retirement are qualified, the $961,218 of earnings is never taxed at all — not when it accrues, not when it is withdrawn. The same $245,000 saved in a taxable brokerage account would shed tax on dividends and realized gains along the way and capital gains tax at the end. The Roth wrapper is the entire difference, and it costs the saver nothing but the up-front decision to pay tax on the seed instead of the harvest.

The traditional IRA comparison — honestly framed.

A traditional IRA runs the movie backwards: contributions are typically tax-deductible going in, growth is tax-deferred, and withdrawals in retirement are taxed as ordinary income. Project the identical saver into a traditional account and the pre-tax balance at 65 is the same $1,206,218 — identical contributions, identical returns. The difference appears at the exit. If that retiree's withdrawals were taxed at a flat illustrative 22 percent, the tax on the full balance would come to roughly $265,368, leaving about $940,850 of spendable money against the Roth saver's full $1,206,218. But do not crown a winner from that arithmetic alone, because it omits the first act: the traditional saver's deductions saved tax every year along the way, money that could itself have been invested, while the Roth saver's $7,000 contributions were made with dollars that had already survived taxation. The real contest is between your tax rate today and your tax rate in retirement. Expect retirement rates to be equal or higher — common for early-career savers whose incomes will rise, and for anyone who suspects tax law will not get gentler — and the Roth wins. Expect a much lower retirement rate, and traditional can win. Many households rationally hold both, which buys tax diversification: a choice, each year of retirement, of which bucket to spend from. This calculator deliberately keeps that tax comparison in prose rather than pretending a growth engine can compute your future tax code — anyone's honest answer depends on rates nobody can know today.

Ten years is worth more than bigger contributions.

The cruelest variable in the projection is not the return and not the limit. It is the start date. Move the standard saver five years younger — start at 25, retire at 65, same $7,000 a year at 8 percent — and the extra five contributions total just $35,000 more out of pocket, yet the balance grows to about $1,813,396, roughly $607,000 more than starting at 30, on $280,000 of total contributions. The last five years of a compounding curve are where the curve bends upward most steeply, and you only get them by owning the first five. The practical translation is not that a 40-year-old has failed — the second example in this calculator shows a 40-year-old with a $25,000 head start contributing $7,000 a year at 7 percent still reaching about $578,429 by 65, of which $378,429 is earnings — but that the best day to open the account is measured in decades, and the second-best day is today. Even the catch-up saver at 50, contributing $8,000 a year at 7 percent on a $100,000 balance, reaches roughly $562,603 by 67 — proof that a late start with real contributions still builds a serious, mostly tax-free asset.

Contribution limits and the rules around them.

The annual contribution limit is set by the IRS and adjusts over time, so treat any printed figure as a snapshot and verify the current limit before you contribute. The widely published limit for 2025 is $7,000 for savers under 50, with an additional catch-up allowance bringing it to $8,000 for savers aged 50 and over — the figures this page's examples are built on. Three more constraints matter as much as the headline number. First, you need earned income — wages or self-employment income — at least equal to what you contribute; investment income and gifts do not qualify on their own. Second, the limit is per person across all your IRAs combined, Roth and traditional together, not per account. Third, a spousal IRA lets a working spouse fund an account for a non-working spouse, doubling the household's room. Exceeding the limit is not a victimless paperwork error: excess contributions carry an annual penalty tax until they are removed, which is why one careful check of the current IRS figure each January belongs in every Roth saver's routine.

Income phase-outs: where the front door narrows.

Direct Roth contributions have an income ceiling that most savers never meet and high earners cannot ignore. Above certain modified adjusted gross income levels — thresholds the IRS sets and indexes over time, varying by filing status — the amount you may contribute directly phases down and then disappears entirely. This page intentionally prints no threshold table: the figures change, they differ for single and married filers, and a stale number copied into a decision is worse than no number at all. Check the current phase-out ranges in IRS Publication 590-A or with your tax software before contributing if your income is anywhere near the territory. Higher earners who find the front door closed often encounter the so-called backdoor Roth — contributing to a traditional IRA and converting it — which is a real and widely used strategy, but one with genuinely technical tax mechanics, including a pro-rata rule that can tax the conversion based on your other IRA balances. It belongs in a conversation with a tax professional, not in a calculator's fine print, and this page flags it for exactly that reason.

The five-year rules, plural.

Roth IRAs run on two separate five-year clocks, and confusing them is the most common rule error savers make. The first clock governs earnings. It starts on January 1 of the tax year of your first Roth contribution, and once five tax years have passed and you are 59 and a half or older, withdrawals of earnings are qualified — fully tax-free. Both conditions must be met; being 62 with a three-year-old account does not qualify your earnings. The second clock applies to conversions: amounts converted from a traditional IRA carry their own five-year period for penalty purposes when withdrawn, and each conversion starts its own clock. Note what neither clock touches: your own contributions remain withdrawable at any time, as described earlier, because that money was taxed before it went in. There are also limited exceptions that can make earnings withdrawals qualified or penalty-relieved in specific situations — disability, a first-home purchase within a lifetime dollar cap, and certain other statutory cases — each with its own conditions. The calculators' job is the projection; for a withdrawal that leans on an exception, confirm the details against current IRS rules before acting.

Roth versus the rest of your retirement stack.

A Roth IRA does not compete with your workplace plan so much as complete it. The standard ordering most savers follow still applies: contribute enough to a 401(k) to capture the full employer match, because an unclaimed match is declined salary; then use the Roth IRA for its investment freedom, low costs, and tax-free exit; then return to the workplace plan or other accounts with whatever remains. Two structural advantages deserve emphasis. Roth IRAs have no required minimum distributions during the original owner's lifetime, so the account can keep compounding untouched while other money is spent first — and it passes to heirs under its own set of distribution rules. And because Roth withdrawals do not add to taxable income, retirees can manage their tax bracket, and the income figures that feed into other calculations, with unusual precision by blending Roth and traditional withdrawals year by year. None of that requires predicting future tax law perfectly. It requires owning an account whose tax treatment is already settled — the one account in the stack where the IRS has been paid and will not be back.

Mistakes this projection can help you avoid.

The most expensive is contributing without earned income or beyond the limit, discovered years later with penalties attached. The second is withdrawing earnings in your forties for a purchase that felt urgent, converting a lifetime tax shelter into a tax bill — remember the contributions-only flexibility exists precisely so earnings rarely need to be touched. The third is treating the projection as a promise: an 8 percent expected return is a planning assumption drawn from long-run stock market history, not a rate any account guarantees, and real returns arrive in a jagged order that no calculator models. Run this page at 8 percent, then at 6, and look at the distance between the two results — on the standard example, even the conservative path builds a balance most savers would be proud to retire beside, and planning that survives the 6 percent column is planning you can trust. The final mistake is the quietest: never opening the account at all because the first contribution felt too small to matter. The worked example above is built from $7,000 years, but the math of compounding respects $2,000 years and $500 years in exactly the same way — proportionally, patiently, and entirely in favor of whoever starts.

How to use this calculator well.

Enter your current age and the retirement age you are planning around, your existing Roth balance if you have one, and the annual contribution you can honestly sustain — the IRS limit if you can manage it, a smaller real number if you cannot, because a projection built on a contribution you will abandon by March is fiction. Set the expected return soberly: long-run diversified stock returns have historically lived in the high single digits before inflation, and choosing 7 or 8 percent for planning, then stress-testing at 6, is more useful than typing 12 and enjoying the scenery. Read the results in this order: total contributions, total earnings, projected balance. The earnings line is the point of the account — it is the pile of money the tax code has agreed never to touch, provided you respect the qualification rules. Then run the version of your life where you start five years sooner or contribute for five years longer, and notice which input moves the ending balance most. It is almost never the return. It is the calendar — and the calendar is the one input you can still change today.

With the pre-filled defaults — Current Age 30 yrs, Retirement Age 65 yrs, Current Roth IRA Balance $0, Annual Contribution $7,000, Expected Annual Return 8% — the Roth IRA Calculator returns Years to Retirement 35 yrs, Growth of Current Balance $0.00, Growth of Future Contributions $1,206,217.63, Projected Balance at Retirement $1,206,217.63, Total Money You Put In $245,000.00, Total Earnings (tax-free if qualified) $961,217.63. Change any input and those results update instantly, so you can see exactly how each number you enter moves the answer.