401(k) Calculator – Contribution, Employer Match and Growth (2026)

Most 401(k) questions are not really investment questions. They are arithmetic questions with rules attached: how much of this paycheck can I defer, what does a withdrawal actually cost after tax and penalty, how much may I borrow, what balance do the deposits add up to at 50 or 60, and what monthly income could that balance pay out? That is the work this page does. Used as a 401k estimator, the calculator above projects your balance from your age, salary, contribution rate, employer match and an assumed return, and the sections below work the five mechanical jobs around it — withdrawals, loans, contributions and IRS limits, balances by age, and payout in retirement — each with its figures recomputed line by line.

Two honest boundaries. First, every projection here is an illustration built on stated assumptions — a flat return, the salary and contribution pattern you enter — not a forecast and not personal financial or tax advice; your plan’s fees, funds and rules decide your real outcome. Second, this page deliberately leaves the full retirement picture to its sibling tool. If your question is how a 401(k) fits alongside Social Security, pensions and spending in retirement — or how match and growth play out across a whole retirement plan — start with the Retirement Calculator and its 401(k) mode, then come back here for the withdrawal, loan and limit mechanics it does not cover.

What the estimator models exactly: your contributions and your employer’s match year by year (with the 2026 IRS limits checked against your age), growth compounded annually at your assumed return net of the plan fee you enter, and — if you switch it on — a withdrawal plan in retirement. What it does not model: taxes on contributions or withdrawals (the withdrawal calculator below runs that math on your own rates), an outstanding 401(k) loan, or a salary path other than the growth rate you set. Where a section below uses a tax rate, a loan rate or a return, the assumption is printed next to the result it produces, so you can re-run the same arithmetic with your own numbers.

A pre-tax 401(k) withdrawal is taxed as ordinary income in the year you take it — the money went in untaxed, so it comes out taxed. Take the money before age 59½ and a second charge usually applies: a 10% additional tax (the early-withdrawal penalty) on top of the income tax. Read this page as a 401k withdrawal calculator and the gross-to-net path is always the same three lines: start with the gross amount, subtract income tax at your marginal rate, subtract the 10% penalty if it applies. What remains is what you actually keep.

The penalty is the expensive line, and the exceptions to it are worth knowing precisely. The best-known is the rule of 55: if you leave your job in or after the calendar year you turn 55, withdrawals from that employer’s 401(k) escape the 10% penalty (income tax still applies — the same $20,000 at 22% would net $15,600.00). The penalty also does not apply to distributions after disability, to substantially equal periodic payments taken under the IRS’s Section 72(t) schedule, to distributions after death, or under a domestic-relations court order. Hardship distributions are a separate door: many plans allow them for an immediate and heavy financial need, but a hardship withdrawal is still taxed as income and — unless an exception fits — still carries the 10% penalty; whether your plan offers one, and for what, is your plan’s decision, not the IRS’s.

One mechanical detail surprises people: when you take a distribution that is eligible for rollover, the plan generally withholds 20% for federal tax before you see the money. Withholding is not the tax itself — it is a prepayment. If your true cost is higher (the worked example above totals 32% with the penalty), you owe the difference when you file; if it is lower, the excess comes back as a refund.

At the other end of working life sit required minimum distributions. Under SECURE 2.0, RMDs from a traditional 401(k) begin at age 73 if you were born from 1951 through 1959, and at 75 if you were born in 1960 or later (rules as of the 2026 tax year). Each year’s RMD is the prior December 31 balance divided by an IRS life-expectancy factor, and it is taxed as ordinary income like any other withdrawal; designated Roth 401(k) accounts have had no lifetime RMDs since 2024. The payout section below picks up where RMDs begin: turning a balance into a planned monthly income rather than a required one.

The rates are yours to enter because the right marginal rate depends on the rest of your tax year — the withdrawal stacks on top of your other income. The tool assumes the whole amount is pre-tax money (contributions and earnings); a withdrawal that includes Roth or after-tax money is taxed differently. General information on IRS rules as of October 2026, not tax advice.

A 401(k) loan is not a withdrawal — no tax, no penalty — provided it stays inside the IRS limits and is repaid on schedule. Think of this section as the 401k loan calculator in worked form. The federal ceiling on a plan loan is the lesser of $50,000 or 50% of your vested account balance, with one small-account exception: if 50% of your vested balance is under $10,000, you may borrow up to $10,000 — but only if your plan includes that exception, which it is not required to do. The $50,000 cap is also reduced if you had another loan outstanding during the previous twelve months. Your plan may set lower limits, or offer no loans at all; the figures here are the federal maximums.

Federal loan ceilings under IRS rules (Retirement Topics — Loans). Your plan’s own limits may be lower.

Repayment terms are fixed by the same rules: a general-purpose loan must be repaid within five years, in substantially level payments made at least quarterly (a loan to buy your primary home may run longer). The interest you pay goes back into your own account — you are paying yourself — but the borrowed money is out of the market while it is borrowed, and that missed growth is the loan’s real cost.

The risk that turns a cheap loan expensive is separation. If you leave your job — quit, laid off, fired — with a loan outstanding, the plan can offset your balance by the amount still owed. That offset is treated as a distribution: taxed as income, plus the 10% penalty if you are under 59½. You can rescue it by rolling the offset amount (from other money) into an IRA by your tax-filing deadline, extensions included — but the cash has to come from somewhere, at exactly the moment a job ends. That is why the standard advice is blunt: borrow only what you could repay quickly if the job disappeared tomorrow.

The maximum follows the IRS rule from the section above: the lesser of $50,000 or 50% of your vested balance, with the $10,000 small-balance exception where 50% falls below $10,000 (only if your plan includes it). The $50,000 cap is also reduced by your highest loan balance in the previous twelve months — not modelled here. Your plan may allow less, or no loans at all.

Every contribution question starts from the same division, which is why this page works as a 401k contribution calculator: annual salary × your contribution percentage ÷ pay periods per year. On an $80,000 salary contributing 10%, that is $8,000 a year — $307.69 from each of 26 biweekly paychecks, or $666.67 a month. The percentage is what you control; the limits below are what the IRS controls, and for 2026 they are these (IRS Notice 2025-67, November 2025):

IRS limits for the 2026 tax year (Notice 2025-67). The calculator above applies the deferral limits for your age automatically and warns you if you pass them.

The employer match has its own small formula, and it is the one piece of 401(k) math with a guaranteed return. A typical plan matches 50% of the first 6% you contribute — used as an employer match calculator, that reads: on an $80,000 salary, contributing the full 6% ($4,800) earns a $2,400 match, worth 3% of salary. Contribute only 3% ($2,400) and the match halves to $1,200 — you leave $1,200 of employer money unclaimed every year, and contributing 10% or 15% does not raise the match past $2,400, because the formula stops at the cap. The match-first rule follows directly: contribute at least up to the full match before sending extra dollars anywhere else. (Projecting what a match grows into over a full retirement is the Retirement Calculator’s job; the mechanics — formula, cap, per-paycheck amounts — are what this 401k match calculator section is for.)

At the top end, a 401k max contribution calculator view separates the two ceilings people merge into one. Your own deferrals stop at $24,500 for 2026 ($32,500 at 50+, $35,750 at 60–63). The $72,000 overall cap is a different, larger bucket: it counts your deferrals plus employer match and profit-sharing, so an employer would have to add $47,500 on top of a maxed-out $24,500 deferral before the overall cap binds. Maxing the deferral alone costs $942.31 per biweekly paycheck ($2,041.67 monthly; $1,250.00 biweekly with the 50+ catch-up).

Self-employed savers get both sides of the plan in one person. A solo 401(k) lets you contribute as employee (the same $24,500 deferral for 2026, plus catch-ups) and as your own employer, with a profit-sharing contribution of up to 25% of compensation — which, for a sole proprietor, works out to 20% of net self-employment income after the deductible half of self-employment tax, under the IRS’s rate table. As a solo 401k contribution calculator example: on $100,000 of such net income, the employer side adds $20,000, the employee side $24,500, for $44,500 total — comfortably inside the $72,000 overall cap, and a useful check on why the solo structure suits one-person businesses.

Two-tier formulas are the norm, not the exception: the IRS safe-harbor design matches 100% of the first 3% of pay plus 50% of the next 2%, and many plans vary it. The trap is the window’s top edge — contributions past it earn no further match, and contributions below it leave employer money unclaimed. At the defaults above, contributing 4% captures $2,800.00 of a possible $3,200.00; the last $400.00 a year costs $800.00 more from you, and inside the window the employer adds 50 cents to every extra dollar — the cheapest retirement money there is. The optimiser also checks the window against the 2026 IRS elective-deferral limit for your age ($24,500 under 50; $32,500 at 50 or older; $35,750 at ages 60–63, per IRS Notice 2025-67), because a match window you cannot legally reach is a plan-design problem, not a savings problem.

The two federal-minimum schedules for employer money in a defined-contribution plan (IRC §411(a)), plus immediate vesting. Your plan’s summary description is the document that decides your own figure.

Why it matters: the unvested part is not a penalty or a fee — it was never fully yours. Leave before the schedule completes and the plan removes it from your account, which is why a job change late in a cliff schedule is the expensive moment: at the defaults above, leaving after two years on the graded schedule takes $8,000.00 of employer money off the table, and one more year of service would have doubled what you keep. Rules checked October 2026.

Every projection on this page runs through one formula, the same one the calculator uses. For a single deposit it is FV = balance × (1 + r)ⁿ; for a deposit repeated every year it is FV = yearly × (((1 + r)ⁿ − 1) ÷ r), where r is the annual return and n the years left. A 401k future value calculator is just those two lines added together: what you already have, grown, plus what you keep adding, grown. Run as a 401k projection calculator with one fixed scenario — start at 25 with nothing saved, a $60,000 salary held flat, 10% contributed plus a 50%-of-6% match ($7,800 a year in total), and a 7% annual return — it becomes a 401k calculator by age, with a balance for each milestone:

Illustration only: $60,000 salary (no raises), $7,800 a year of employee-plus-match deposits, 7% return, no withdrawals or fees. Your inputs will differ — the formula will not.

Read the last column’s shape, because it is the whole argument for starting early. In the first five years the balance ($44,855.76) is barely more than the $39,000 deposited. By 50 the balance ($493,342.49) is nearly double the $195,000 put in, and by 67 the deposits of $327,600 have become $1,798,931.47 — the difference is growth compounding on growth, which is why the return assumption matters more the longer the horizon runs.

The same formula answers the balance-check question savers bring to a 401k balance calculator: what is my existing balance worth if I change nothing? A $50,000 balance at 45, left invested at 7% with no new deposits, reaches $193,484.22 by 65 on compounding alone. Keep adding the same $7,800 a year and the 65 balance is $513,249.06 — the deposits themselves contribute $319,764.84 of growth-inclusive value. Enter your own balance, salary and match in the calculator above and it runs exactly this arithmetic on your numbers, including the plan fee and inflation adjustments the table leaves out.

The last mechanical question is the reverse of the first: not “what will it grow to?” but “what will it pay me?” Used as a 401k payout calculator, the cleanest answer is an amortisation — spread the balance, plus continued growth, over a fixed number of years so it reaches zero on the last payment. On a stated balance of $1,000,000 at 65 earning 5% in retirement, the recomputed payouts are:

Stretching the period by five years cuts the monthly figure by about $754 — that gap is the honest price of a longer plan, visible in one subtraction. The calculator’s withdrawal mode runs the same computation on your projected balance with your own withdrawal amount and end age, and tells you the year the money runs out if it does.

You will meet the 4% rule quoted as a shortcut for the same question: withdraw 4% of the starting balance in year one — $40,000 on $1,000,000 — then adjust that amount for inflation each year. Treat it as what it is, a historical heuristic from US market data, not a formula and not a guarantee: it ignores your tax bracket (401(k) payouts are ordinary income), your other income, and the order returns arrive in. The amortisation above is less famous but more transparent — every input is on the page. And if the question is income that cannot run out at all, that is an annuity’s job, not a drawdown’s: price it with the Annuity Payout Calculator, and use the figures here as the keep-it-invested comparison.

Projection to age 95: each year’s RMD is the prior December 31 balance divided by that year’s Uniform Lifetime Table factor; what remains then grows at your assumed return. If you are already past your start age, read the row for your current age.

Two 401(k)-specific points. First, if you are still working for the employer that sponsors this plan and you do not own more than 5% of the business, that plan’s RMDs can usually wait until you retire — the start ages above are the statutory default, and IRAs have no such still-working exception. Second, designated Roth 401(k) accounts have had no lifetime RMDs since 2024. For the deeper machinery — qualified charitable distributions, inherited accounts, the joint-life table when a spouse is more than ten years younger — use the dedicated RMD Calculator; this projection runs the same IRS table to age 95. Factors from IRS Publication 590-B; checked October 2026.

A solo 401(k) is a 401(k) for a business with no employees other than the owner and, if applicable, a spouse. If you are self-employed — a sole proprietor, a single-member LLC taxed as a sole proprietorship, or an S corporation owner with W-2 wages — the answer to “is there a 401(k) for the self-employed” is yes, and it works in two parts. As the employee, you defer salary exactly as an employee of a larger company would, up to the same elective-deferral limit shown above: $24,500 for 2026, plus the $8,000 catch-up at age 50 and over ($11,250 at ages 60 to 63). As the employer, the business adds a profit-sharing contribution on top, and the two parts together must stay within the combined cap of $72,000 shown above ($80,000 with the age-50 catch-up). There is no employer match to chase in a solo plan — the employer contribution is the second part, and you control both sides of it.

The employer part is where the arithmetic differs by business type, because “compensation” means something different in each. For an S corporation, compensation is your W-2 wages, and the employer contribution may be up to 25% of those wages: on $80,000 of W-2 pay, that is $20,000, which with the $24,500 employee deferral totals $44,500 — under the combined cap. For a sole proprietor, compensation is net self-employment earnings after two subtractions: half of self-employment tax, and the employer contribution itself. That circularity is why the effective rate is 20% of adjusted net earnings, not 25%: the contribution reduces the very compensation it is measured against. Worked through, on $100,000 of Schedule C profit the steps are: self-employment tax on 92.35% of profit is $14,129.55, half of it is $7,064.78, adjusted net earnings are $92,935.23, and 20% of that is an $18,587.05 employer contribution. Add the $24,500 employee deferral and the total is $43,087.05, again under the combined cap. The calculator on this page prices the employee side of the plan — the deferral, the growth, the withdrawal math — and the companion guide works the employer side, the S corporation variant, and the Roth question in full.

Three practical points complete the picture. First, the plan must exist before the year ends: adopt the plan by 31 December of the tax year, and the contributions themselves can generally be made by your tax-return filing deadline. Second, a spouse who works in the business can generally participate too, with their own employee deferral and their own share of the combined cap — which is one reason solo plans suit genuine two-person family businesses and no other employees: hire a non-spouse employee and the plan stops being a solo plan. Third, the Roth choice sits on the employee side only in most plans: employee deferrals can be designated Roth (taxed now, withdrawn tax-free under the usual rules), while employer contributions are traditionally pre-tax, so the two parts can be taxed differently on the way out — the withdrawal section above prices exactly that difference. None of this is tax advice, and the contribution that is right for a given year depends on the business’s actual profit, its tax position, and the plan document — confirm the figures with a tax professional before funding.