Retirement calculator for 14 countries

Most retirement calculators are built for one country and quietly break in another: they call your pension a 401(k), assume a benefit you will never receive, or apply a capital gains tax that does not exist where you live. Coastline runs 14 separate tax engines — each with its own accounts, its own public benefit and its own year-by-year tax math, each pinned against hand-derived sourced figures. Pick your country and the whole model changes, not just the currency symbol.

Every country, and what it needs

The last two columns run one identical retiree — age 65, 40,000 a year of after-tax spending in local currency, to age 95, no state pension counted — through that country's own engine. Same nominal amounts in each currency, no exchange rate applied, so the figures isolate the tax system rather than the cost of living.

Wrapper and benefit names come from the app's own country registry, so each row uses that country's terminology rather than translated American nouns. "none" is a real answer: Hong Kong has no tax-free wrapper because an ordinary investment account there is already untaxed, New Zealand has none because KiwiSaver is taxed going in and exempt coming out, and the nine zero-tax jurisdictions have none because there is no tax for a wrapper to shelter.

What makes each system different

🇺🇸 United States USD

Taxes its citizens on worldwide income wherever they live — the only system here that does. Progressive federal tax plus state tax (nine states levy none), a 401k for deferred money and a Roth for tax-free, and a Social Security benefit sized by your own earnings record. Retirement calculator →

🇨🇦 Canada CAD

Registered accounts do the work: an RRSP/RRIF that must convert by 71 with minimum withdrawals after, and a TFSA that is tax-free coming and going. CPP can start at 60, and OAS is clawed back above net income of 95,323 — which makes managing taxable income a genuine lever. Canadian calculator →

🇬🇧 United Kingdom GBP

No joint assessment of any kind: a couple is simply two taxpayers with two allowances. ISAs are entirely tax-free, 25% of each pension withdrawal is tax-free up to a cumulative 268,275, there are no minimum withdrawals ever — and every allowance is frozen in cash terms until 2031, so fiscal drag is a modelled cost rather than an abstraction. Scotland sets its own rates.

🇳🇿 New Zealand NZD

No capital gains tax at all, and no tax-free wrapper either — KiwiSaver is taxed going in and exempt coming out. Instead the tax lands annually on the balance: a PIE fund pays tax on a deemed 5% of opening value under the fair dividend rate. NZ Super is flat-rate, universal, not means-tested, and starts at exactly 65 — no early claim, no deferral bonus, no contribution record needed.

🇭🇰 Hong Kong HKD

No capital gains tax, no dividend tax and no interest tax on an individual, so an ordinary investments account is already tax-free in substance and needs no wrapper — MPF is the only one that exists. And there is no state pension whatsoever: the means-tested Old Age Living Allowance is social assistance, not a retirement benefit, so the portfolio funds everything.

🇦🇪 🇶🇦 🇰🇼 🇧🇭 🇸🇦 🇧🇸 🇰🇾 🇲🇨 🇧🇳 The nine zero-income-tax jurisdictions

United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, The Bahamas, Cayman Islands, Monaco, Brunei Darussalam. These share one engine, because they share one rule: no personal income tax, no capital gains tax, no dividend or interest tax, and no sub-national tax. Gross equals net, in every year, to the cent — and there is no tax-advantaged wrapper anywhere in the group, because with a zero rate there is nothing for one to shelter. There is also no state pension for an expatriate in any of them, which is why they need 21.00× their annual spending in capital, against 6.50× for New Zealand once its NZ Super is counted.

What genuinely differs between the nine is not tax. 5 of them have a statutory end-of-service entitlement — often the largest single cash event in a Gulf career — and 4 charge an employee-side social contribution the engine documents but does not deduct:

The end-of-service column is each jurisdiction's own statutory formula, computed by the engine at 20 years of service and expressed in months of wage. The UAE, Qatar and Kuwait rules accrue on the basic wage only, excluding housing and transport allowances; Saudi Arabia and Bahrain use the whole wage. Monaco and Brunei Darussalam, the Bahamas and Cayman have no service-based gratuity at all.

Two carve-outs matter more than the rest. Monaco's exemption does not cover French nationals, who remain subject to French income tax under the 1963 Franco-Monegasque Convention if they took up residence on or after 13 October 1957. And United Arab Emirates charges a natural person carrying on a business 9% corporate tax once that business's turnover passes AED 1,000,000 — employment and personal investment income stay outside it, and that is what this engine models.

Oman is deliberately absent from the nine. It has legislated a personal income tax effective 1 January 2028 — 5% above OMR 42,000, reaching expatriates too — so calling it tax-free would be wrong for all but the first two years of a thirty-year plan.

Where you are tax-resident is not a preference

A comparison of tax systems is useful for deciding what a move would be worth. It cannot decide where you are taxed. You become tax-resident somewhere by living there under its rules — day-count tests, permanent-home tests, sponsorship and visa conditions — and several of these jurisdictions cannot be lived in at all without an employer sponsor or a substantial investment. Leaving a system is frequently harder than entering one.

One case deserves stating flatly, because it invalidates the zero-tax rows for a large share of readers: the United States taxes citizens and green-card holders on worldwide income regardless of residence. If that is you, you still file with the IRS from Dubai or George Town, and while the foreign earned income exclusion and foreign tax credits can reduce tax on earned income, they do not shelter investment income or portfolio withdrawals. Model the United States row.

What the engines have in common

Every country runs the same chassis, so the parts of a plan that are not country-specific behave identically and any difference you see is a real difference in tax law: career phases and dual incomes, housing and rentals, spending and inflation, Monte Carlo and historical-sequence market stress-testing, and a click-through breakdown of the arithmetic behind every figure. What changes per country is the tax and benefit layer — and the app's labels change with it, so a United Kingdom plan never tells you its money is drawn "brokerage then 401k".

Two things worth knowing before you trust a cross-border figure. First, this is one plan in one system at a time: it does not model a move mid-plan, a tax treaty, or income taxed in two countries at once. Second, the app's modelled out-of-pocket medical shock differs enormously by country — from £3,000 where a public system absorbs catastrophic care to $12,000 in the United States — because that exposure is a genuine part of retirement risk, not a rounding error.

Every figure on this page is computed at build time by the same engines the calculator runs, for the 2026 tax year, at the assumptions stated above. Educational projections, not tax advice; verify your own position with a qualified professional in your jurisdiction before acting.

Common questions

Keep exploring