Can you retire at 57 with £600k?

The £31,700 a year sits between the PLSA’s minimum and moderate standards — roughly £1,000 short of a ‘moderate’ lifestyle. It covers the essentials comfortably, but leaves less room for the extras (bigger holidays, running two cars) that the moderate figure builds in.

For the 10 years between finishing work at 57 and the State Pension arriving at 67, every penny of income comes from your own pots. That first year the tax bill is modest — around £7,500 on £67,000 of gross withdrawals, an effective rate of about 11% — because a quarter of each SIPP withdrawal is tax-free and the taxable slice mostly sits in the basic-rate band.

From 67 the full new State Pension — about £11,502 a year in today’s money, and triple-locked so it broadly keeps pace with prices — covers roughly 36% of your £31,700 target on its own. From that point your pots only have to find the rest, so they stretch a good deal further than they do in the bridge years before it starts.

The plan is designed to run the pots down to roughly zero by age 95: both the £420,000 SIPP and the £180,000 ISA are put to work rather than left as a large estate. If leaving something behind matters to you, you’d take a little less each year.

At 57 the pension rules are not your constraint — you are past the normal minimum pension age of 55 and past the 57 it rises to in April 2028, so the full £600,000 is available immediately. The constraint is the 10-year wait for the State Pension, the longest on this grid for anyone with unrestricted access. That decade is where the plan is most exposed: withdrawals are at their highest and there is nothing underneath them, so a weak first few years of returns does disproportionate damage. If you are going to stress-test one part of this projection, test that stretch.

Putting the shortfall in pot terms rather than income: at 57 you’d need around £630,000 to reach the £32,700 moderate benchmark, against the £600,000 modelled here — a gap of roughly £30,000. That framing is often more useful than the income gap, because it tells you what another few years of contributions and growth would have to deliver to change the answer.

Over the full 39-year plan the model projects roughly £169,000 of income tax in total — an average of about £4,300 a year, though it is not spread evenly. The bill is lightest in the bridge years, when the 25% tax-free element of each SIPP withdrawal does the most work, and steps up once the State Pension starts at 67 and occupies most of your personal allowance on its own. From that point every pound drawn from the SIPP is taxable from the first penny.

What would close the gap? On the same assumptions, starting with £700k instead, or holding on to age 59 before finishing work, would lift the sustainable income past the £32,700 moderate benchmark.