Retirement Savings by Age — Fidelity's milestones at your income

How it works

The arithmetic is one multiplication per milestone: the published multiple times your income. What matters is what this page deliberately does not do: it never interpolates between the five published ages — the guideline states five points, so five points are what render, and at age 35 your reference is the next one (3× by 40), not an invented 2×-ish figure. The outputs are the next milestone's dollar target at your income, the gap between it and what you have, and the years until that age. The table prices all five milestones at once. Attribution is load-bearing here: these are Fidelity's numbers, under Fidelity's assumptions — a 15% lifetime savings rate, retirement at 67, 45% income replacement, age-based allocations — and a different set of assumptions would produce a different ladder.

Fidelity's milestones (published guideline, read 2026-07-21)

Source: Fidelity Investments, retirement guidelines. Fidelity describes these as hypothetical illustrations and not guarantees of future results.

Worked example

At the default inputs — age 35, $75,000 income, $50,000 saved — the next published milestone is 3× income by 40 (Fidelity's guideline), a target of $225,000. The gap from $50,000 is $175,000 with five years to the milestone age: this calculator's multiplication of the published multiple, with the milestone itself being the sourced figure and everything at your income being arithmetic on it.

Frequently asked questions

Where do these savings-by-age numbers come from?

Fidelity's published guideline — 1× by 30, 3× by 40, 6× by 50, 8× by 60, 10× by 67 — cited here as that named source's benchmark, not as a rule. It is the most widely referenced ladder of its kind, which is exactly why the attribution and its assumptions belong on the same page as the numbers.

What assumptions sit behind the milestones?

Fidelity's stated ones: saving 15% of income throughout a career, retiring at 67, replacing 45% of pre-retirement income, age-based investment allocations, and a planning horizon into the 90s. Change any of those — earlier retirement, higher replacement — and the ladder shifts, which Fidelity's own materials show with variant multiples.

Am I behind if I'm below the milestone?

The gap output reports distance, not judgment. The milestones assume a specific savings pattern from age 25; a later start, a raise (which moves the target the same day), or years of childcare costs all shift where a real person sits. The useful reading is direction and pace, not pass/fail.

Why does a raise make me look further behind?

Because the targets are multiples of CURRENT income — earn more and every milestone reprices upward instantly, though your past savings were built on smaller paychecks. It is a known artifact of income-multiple benchmarks and another reason to read them as orientation, not verdict.

Why doesn't the page show a target for my exact age?

Because the source doesn't publish one. Fidelity states five points; inventing values between them would be fabricating data under a real company's name. The page reports the next published milestone and the years you have to reach it instead.

How do I close a gap the page shows?

That is a savings-rate question: the savings-goal calculator solves the monthly deposit that reaches a target in the years available — feed it the gap and the years-to-milestone from this page, and it prices the catch-up at your assumed return.

How accurate is this, and what does it exclude?

The multiplications are exact; the benchmarks themselves are one firm's model under its stated assumptions — Fidelity calls them hypothetical illustrations, not guarantees. Excluded: pensions and Social Security timing, spousal savings, home equity, and your actual retirement age and spending — all of which move a personal target away from any one-size ladder.