Updated August 1, 2026. Quick answer: if you are behind, the catch-up rules are the largest legal lever you have left — and the biggest one is a four-year window most people do not know exists. For 2026 the workplace-plan limit is $24,500; at 50 you can add $8,000 for a total of $32,500; and at ages 60 to 63 the catch-up rises to $11,250 instead, taking the total to $35,750. Add an IRA at $7,500 plus a $1,100 catch-up from 50. This works out what the whole stack is worth by the time you retire.
The calculator
The 60-to-63 window is the part people miss
SECURE 2.0 created a higher catch-up for employees aged 60, 61, 62 and 63 — $11,250 for 2026, applying instead of the $8,000, not on top of it. It is the largest contribution window that exists, and it lasts exactly four years. Miss it and there is no way to make it up later.
Two details that decide whether you can actually use it: why the amount did not rise this year, and how catch-ups sit outside the overall annual additions limit — which is what makes them genuinely additional rather than crowding out your match.
If you are a higher earner, your catch-up may have to be Roth
This is the other SECURE 2.0 change, and the timing has been widely misreported: the Roth catch-up requirement applies now, not in 2027. It matters for cash flow rather than for the limit — a Roth catch-up costs you the deduction this year in exchange for tax-free withdrawals later, so the amount you can contribute is unchanged but the after-tax cost of contributing it is not. One edge worth knowing if your pay is unusual: the rule keys off FICA wages, and some people have none.
Where this fits
If you have not yet worked out the size of the problem, do that first — the gap, in dollars a year and in working years. This page is the answer to what closing it takes from the contribution side. The other two levers are spending less in retirement and working longer, and the gap calculator prices both.
Worth pairing with: whether conversions pay for the balance you already have, and whether an adviser earns their fee once the accounts get complicated.
2026 limits from the IRS announcement of Notice 2025-67, read August 1, 2026. Limits are indexed and change annually; check the current year before relying on a figure. General information, not tax advice.
The costs decided years before you see them: the Part B late-enrolment penalty (10% per full year, permanent), the Part D penalty (1% per month, no threshold), and the HSA six-month lookback — where Medicare backdates and your contributions become excess retroactively.
Thinking about clearing the mortgage first? Run it against your own numbers — including the deduction reality check, since a couple both over 65 has a $35,500 standard deduction in 2026 and most mortgage interest therefore deducts nothing, and the gross-up if the money comes from an IRA.
The pro-rata rule is not fixed — the denominator is. The fraction is measured on 31 December, so moving pre-tax IRA balances into an employer 401(k) before then removes them from it entirely, and your after-tax basis is legally barred from following. Order of operations matters, and a SIMPLE IRA inside its first two years blocks it.
The larger version, inside the 401(k): the mega backdoor fills the gap up to $72,000 — the 2026 annual additions limit — using after-tax contributions, with catch-up allowances sitting outside that limit entirely. It depends on two optional plan features, so check those first.
For scale, from the Federal Reserve’s own survey data computed in-house: half of households aged 55–64 hold under $16,600 in retirement accounts, while the average is $306,404 — where any balance actually ranks, and why the two numbers differ so violently.
What retirees actually spend
Any answer this calculator gives depends on a spending assumption, so it is worth anchoring that assumption to measured data rather than a rule of thumb. We computed the following from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure microdata for 2024 (Interview survey), reconciled against BLS’s own published table:
| Age of head | Mean spending | Median spending |
|---|---|---|
| 55-64 | $83,102 | $63,323 |
| 65-74 | $64,232 | $50,068 |
| 75+ | $54,915 | $41,548 |
Use the median, not the mean. The mean runs about 30 percent higher in every cohort because a minority of high-spending households pull it up. Medians here are annualised from each household’s single observed quarter, which spreads them wider than a true annual distribution would.
The full study, method and reconciliation
All the numbers, kept current. This page uses 8 figures from our claims register — every figure we track is on one page, each with the year it applies to and a plain statement of what makes it move.