How long will $1 million last in retirement? The honest answer is that it depends, and the spread is wide enough to matter. The same $1 million can run dry in sixteen years or outlast a thirty-five-year retirement with room to spare. The gap is not luck alone. It comes from a handful of inputs you can name and, mostly, control: how much you withdraw, what your portfolio earns, what inflation does, and how old you are when you start.
This article walks through each of those inputs, shows the range they produce, and explains why a single number is the wrong thing to chase in the first place.
The crudest estimate is one division. Take the balance and divide it by what you pull out each year.
Quick math: $1,000,000 ÷ annual withdrawal = years it lasts with no growth and no inflation. At $50,000 a year, that is 20 years.
Treat that as a floor, not a forecast. It assumes the money sits in cash earning nothing, which understates how long it lasts, and it assumes your spending never rises, which overstates it. Two large forces pull against each other once you leave the cash-under-the-mattress world: investment growth stretches the money out, and inflation compresses what each withdrawal actually buys. The real answer lives between those two pulls, and where it lands depends on the levers below.
What you take out each year matters more than almost anything else, because it sets the pace of depletion directly. The table below runs the same $1 million at five withdrawal levels. The middle column is the naive floor (no growth). The right column assumes a balanced stock and bond portfolio earning about 6.25% a year, which after roughly 3% inflation is about 3.25% in real terms, with withdrawals held steady in today's dollars.
| Annual withdrawal from $1M | No growth (floor) | At ~6.25% (≈3.25% real) |
|---|---|---|
| $30,000 (3%) | 33 years | Indefinite* |
| $40,000 (4%) | 25 years | ~52 years |
| $50,000 (5%) | 20 years | ~33 years |
| $60,000 (6%) | ~17 years | ~24 years |
| $80,000 (8%) | ~12 years | ~16 years |
*At a $30,000 draw you are pulling 3% while the portfolio earns about 3.25% above inflation, so growth more than replaces what you take and the balance holds in this smoothed model. That is the knife's edge the whole question turns on. Withdraw less than your portfolio earns after inflation and the principal can last as long as you do. Withdraw more and the clock starts ticking, faster the higher you go. Moving from a 4% draw to a 6% draw cuts the lifespan from about fifty years to the mid-twenties, because the gap between what you take and what the portfolio earns after inflation widens fast.
These are illustrations, not promises. They assume a steady return every year, which no real portfolio delivers, and that is exactly where the next input comes in.
The right-hand column above quietly assumes that 6.25% shows up the same way every year. Markets do not work like that. They deliver the average as a jagged line: a few great years, a few terrible ones, long stretches of mediocre. For a retiree pulling money out, the order of those years is not a detail. It can be the difference between a portfolio that lasts and one that does not.
Picture two retirees, each starting with $1 million and each drawing $50,000 a year adjusted for inflation. Over thirty years they happen to earn the identical average return. The only difference is timing. Retiree A meets a sharp downturn in the first three years of retirement. Retiree B gets those same bad years near the end instead.
Retiree A is selling shares to fund spending while the market is down, locking in losses that never get the chance to recover. Retiree B spends down a portfolio that grew first, so the late downturn lands on a smaller remaining balance and does less damage. Same average return, and Retiree A can run out a decade or more before Retiree B. This is sequence-of-returns risk, and it is the single biggest reason a tidy projection can be wrong in practice. Our guide to sequence-of-returns risk works through the mechanics with a fuller example.
The table holds withdrawals constant in today's dollars on purpose, because that is the only way the years mean anything. A fixed $50,000 withdrawal looks like it lasts longer on paper, but at 3% inflation it buys about half as much after twenty-four years. To keep your standard of living level, the dollar amount you withdraw has to climb every year, and a rising withdrawal drains a portfolio faster than a flat one.
So when a back-of-the-envelope figure says "$1 million lasts 25 years at $40,000 a year," ask whether that $40,000 is frozen or growing with prices. If it is frozen, the real lifespan is shorter than it looks. We cover the full arithmetic in how inflation affects your retirement plan, including how to keep every figure in today's dollars so the numbers stay honest.
Every figure so far assumes the portfolio pays for all of your spending. For most retirees it does not. Social Security, and a pension if you have one, covers part of the budget, and that part needs nothing behind it from the portfolio. What drains the $1 million is only the gap between what you spend and what your guaranteed income pays.
Take a retiree who spends $70,000 a year and collects $30,000 from Social Security. The portfolio is not on the hook for $70,000; it covers the $40,000 gap. On the table above, that moves them from a roughly sixteen-to-twenty-three-year window down to a forty-plus-year one, on the same $1 million. The benefit check did not change the spending. It changed how much of the spending the portfolio has to carry. Sizing the draw against the gap rather than the whole budget is the step most rough estimates skip, and it is covered in how much you need to retire.
Where the money sits changes how long it lasts, because the tax has not all been paid. A $1 million balance in a traditional 401(k) or IRA is pre-tax: every dollar you withdraw is taxable income, so a portion of each draw goes to the IRS rather than to you. A $1 million Roth balance is yours after tax, and qualified withdrawals come out free. In spendable terms, the traditional account is worth less than its statement says, which means it funds fewer years of real spending than an equal Roth balance. The drawdown order across your accounts changes the bill too. Our comparison of Roth versus traditional accounts covers how the tax treatment plays out in retirement.
"Long enough" is not a fixed target. Retire at 65 and a thirty-year horizon is a reasonable plan. Retire at 55 and the same $1 million may need to cover forty years or more, which pushes you toward the lower, safer end of the withdrawal table. Retire at 70 and the money has fewer years to span, so a higher draw can be reasonable. The question is never just how long $1 million lasts; it is whether it lasts longer than you need it to, and that depends on when you start the clock.
$1 million does not come with an expiration date. Depending on what you withdraw, what your portfolio earns and in what order, what inflation does, how much Social Security carries, and how old you are when you begin, the honest range runs from the mid-teens of years to indefinitely. A single number cannot capture that, and any source that gives you one is trading accuracy for a clean headline.
The way to pin down your own figure is to stop solving for a fixed lifespan and start measuring odds. Enter your spending, your Social Security estimate, your accounts, and your retirement age, then run a Monte Carlo simulation. It replays your plan against many randomized return sequences, including the bad-timing ones, and reports how often the money lasts to the age you set. The output is a probability of success rather than a guess, and for a question with this many moving parts, a probability is the only answer worth trusting. You can run it in a few minutes in the calculator.
Enter your savings, spending, and timeline, then run a Monte Carlo simulation to see the probability your money outlasts your retirement.
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