Career Break Impact Calculator

You lose contributions, employer match, and decades of compound growth. At $500/month + 50% match, 2 years off = $18,000 in lost contributions. At 7% for 25 years to retirement, that becomes ~$100,000 less in your nest egg. The calculator shows the exact impact.

If you have taxable income (spouse, part-time work, freelance), you can contribute to a traditional or Roth IRA. Even $200/month helps. If you have no income, you generally cannot contribute to an IRA. A spousal IRA may apply if married filing jointly.

Increase contribution rate when you return. 50+ can use catch-up contributions ($7,500 extra for 401k in 2024). Consider maxing out for a few years. The lost balance is real—aggressive saving post-return can partially offset it.

Yes. Two years of $500/month + 50% match = $18,000 not contributed. At 7% for 25 years, that's ~$100,000 less at retirement. The earlier the break, the more compounding you lose. The calculator quantifies it for your situation.

No. The engine takes five inputs only: monthly retirement contribution, employer match percent, break length, expected return, and years from the end of the break to retirement. Lost wages, missed raises, vesting schedules, and pension or social insurance credits are all outside the model. Read the output as the retirement-account cost of the break in isolation, and budget for the missing paycheck separately - the two are different decisions on different timescales.

The engine treats zero and blank entries as missing values and substitutes defaults before clamping: 2 years for break length, 7% for return, 25 for years to retirement. The clamps that follow are 0.5-20 years, 0-15%, and 0-50 years. So a 0% return cannot be modelled through that field. To see the outcome with no growth at all, read the lost contributions and lost employer match lines instead - neither involves compounding.

Most of it. In the worked example, $12,000 of contributions plus $6,000 of match - $18,000 of actual deposits - project to $104,536.55 at retirement. That leaves $86,536.55, about 83% of the total, as growth that never happened, and makes the projection roughly 5.8 times the cash. The earlier in a career the break falls, the further that ratio tilts toward growth, because the lump sum has longer to compound.

The match field multiplies your entire contribution, so it fits a flat match cleanly and a capped one only after adjustment. Work out the dollars your employer would actually have added each month, divide that by your monthly contribution, and enter the result as the percentage. Contributions above the cap earn no match, so leaving the headline 50% in place while contributing past the cap will overstate the match line and the projected shortfall.