Most FIRE calculators either ignore superannuation or treat it like a footnote. This one models your real Super Guarantee contributions, contribution caps, the 15% contributions and earnings tax, preservation age, and an honest Age Pension estimate — alongside the cash and investments you actually control day to day.
Everything recalculates live. Figures are in today's dollars.
A mortgage stops. Treating the repayment as a permanent expense overstates the capital you need for the rest of your life — leave these blank and nothing below changes.
If you fill these in, make sure the target annual spending above excludes your mortgage repayments — otherwise they are counted twice and your date will look further away than it is.
Super is locked until 60 (and usually until you retire) — the Age Pension doesn't start until 67. Your real "quit date" runs on your liquid portfolio.
Grows through Super Guarantee + any salary sacrifice, net of the 15% contributions tax and an assumed 15% earnings tax drag inside super.
Cash and non-super investments — this is what has to fund your life between "financial independence" and age 60.
Every other expense on this page runs for life. This one stops — and that changes how much capital you actually need.
Employers must pay 12% of ordinary time earnings into super for 2025–26 — the final legislated step, with no further scheduled rises. This applies up to a maximum contribution base of roughly $250,000/year in eligible earnings. Combined SG plus any salary sacrifice counts toward the $30,000/year concessional contributions cap (rising to $32,500 from 1 July 2026) — we don't hard-stop contributions at the cap in this simplified model, so check your own position if you're near it.
Concessional contributions (SG and salary sacrifice) are taxed at 15% on the way in. Investment earnings inside super are taxed at up to 15% in the accumulation phase (effectively lower — around 10% — on long-term capital gains thanks to the one-third CGT discount). We apply a flat 15% drag to the nominal investment return as a simplification of this.
Preservation age is 60 for everyone born after mid-1964 — the earliest you can generally access super once you've met a condition of release such as retiring. The Age Pension is separate and means-tested, available from age 67. We estimate your Age Pension using the assets test only (single, homeowner): full pension ($31,223/year) up to $321,500 in assessable assets, tapering by roughly 7.8% of every dollar above that, reaching zero around $720,000. We do not model the income test, deeming rates in detail, or couple rates — Centrelink applies whichever test (assets or income) gives the lower payment, so treat this as an optimistic estimate.
Unlike credit card debt, HECS/HELP charges no real interest — it's indexed each year to whichever is lower of CPI or the Wage Price Index (around 3.2% recently), and is repaid automatically through the tax system once your income passes $67,000/year (2025–26), at roughly 15% of the amount above that threshold. Because there's no punishing interest rate, most people working toward financial independence are better off investing spare cash than aggressively over-paying HECS. We show your balance and estimated compulsory repayment for context, not as something to race to pay off.
Net rental profit or loss is taxed like any other income — it's added to (or, if it's a loss, subtracted from) your taxable salary and taxed at your marginal rate, using the 2025–26 resident brackets (16% from $18,201, 30% from $45,001, 37% from $135,001, 45% above $190,000) plus the 2% Medicare levy. We compute the marginal impact by comparing tax with and without the rental amount, since a loss saves you tax at your marginal rate rather than a flat rate — this is genuine negative gearing. We ask you to enter your own estimate of net monthly profit/loss after expenses (mortgage interest, agent fees, repairs, depreciation) since these vary hugely by property; we don't model depreciation schedules or capital gains tax on eventual sale. If you're self-employed with no salary entered, we assume no other income when computing the marginal rate, which likely understates the real tax rate for most self-employed landlords.
Every other expense on this page is treated as permanent. A mortgage is not: it ends. Modelling the repayment as if it ran for life overstates the capital you need by roughly the annual repayment divided by your withdrawal rate — on a $2,850 monthly repayment at a 4.5% withdrawal rate, about $760,000 of capital you do not actually need. This is what an Australian reader wrote in to point out, and they were right.
We ask for the balance outstanding rather than your interest rate, because a rate cannot be worked out from a repayment and a term alone — those two figures are consistent with any rate at all until you fix the balance. With all three we derive the rate you are effectively paying and show it, so you can check it against your statement; if it looks wrong, one of the three figures is off, most often the years remaining. If the repayments over the remaining term do not cover the balance, we say so and ignore the mortgage rather than pick a rate that makes the contradiction disappear.
The payoff is fixed in calendar time. Your retirement date moves as you change the inputs, but your last repayment does not move with it — so a loan that ends before you stop working does not change your date at all, and one that runs past it only counts for the months it actually overlaps. Repayments during your working years are already reflected in the monthly saving figure you entered, so we do not subtract them twice.
The chart, and what the two dates mean. The step line shows the spending you have to fund each month: your target plus the repayment, dropping to your target alone once the loan is repaid. It deliberately leaves out the Age Pension and any rental income, which also change what you need but move for reasons that have nothing to do with the mortgage — including them would blur the single point the picture is making. Both are in the date itself. The two dates beneath compare treating the repayment as a permanent expense against modelling the payoff; the first is what this page did before this module existed, and the gap between them is what the correction is worth on your own figures. The timeline marks the stretch between stopping work and super unlocking at 60 — the years your own savings have to cover alone, with no super and no Age Pension.
What we do not model: offset accounts and redraw, which are common in Australia and materially change the picture — money in an offset earns a risk-free, untaxed return equal to your mortgage rate, which usually beats a taxable portfolio at the same headline return; break costs on a fixed loan; the tax treatment of an investment loan as opposed to the home you live in; and any change in your repayment when rates move. We assume a variable principal-and-interest loan. Your home equity is deliberately left out of both the portfolio you draw on and the Age Pension assets test, because the home you live in is an exempt asset — counting it would inflate your assets and cut your modelled pension.
We model portfolio growth at 7% real for equities and 2.5% real for bonds — "real" meaning after inflation, so every figure on this page is genuinely in today's money.
What changed: this calculator previously used 7% and 3% nominal returns while holding your retirement spending flat at the figure you entered, and still described the results as being in today's dollars. That combination was internally inconsistent: if growth is nominal, spending has to rise with inflation too. We have aligned this page with our main calculator's real-return assumptions. The effect on your date is modest — roughly 0.1 to 1.2 years later depending on your settings, with the largest change for bond-heavy allocations, since only the bond figure moved.
What we have not resolved: whether 7% real for equities is itself too optimistic. It sits at the upper end of current long-run expectations. We would rather show you the assumption plainly than defend a single number, so the Expected real investment returns selector above lets you re-run everything at 6% / 2% or 5% / 1.5%. If your date moves a lot between those settings, that gap is your real exposure to market risk.
The Transfer Balance Cap ($2.1 million from July 2026) on tax-free retirement-phase pensions, Division 293 tax for high earners, Transition to Retirement strategies, the Age Pension income test and deeming rates, couple rates, non-homeowner asset thresholds, and capital gains tax on eventual property sale. Your liquid portfolio is shown as a single deterministic growth line here for simplicity — it does not run the full Monte Carlo range-of-outcomes simulation our main calculator uses.
Australian Taxation Office (ato.gov.au) and Services Australia published rates for 2025–26 and 2026–27, cross-checked against SuperGuide, Canstar, and CFS coverage of the same figures. Educational estimates only — verify your own position at ato.gov.au and servicesaustralia.gov.au before making decisions.