Can you retire at 58 with £700k?

The £36,300 a year this supports clears the moderate benchmark by about £3,600. It’s a workable moderate retirement, but the margin is thin enough that a poor run of early returns would eat into it — worth stress-testing before you commit.

For the 9 years between finishing work at 58 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 32% of your £36,300 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 £490,000 SIPP and the £210,000 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.

Access is settled at 58: both the current minimum pension age of 55 and the 57 it becomes in April 2028 are behind you. What shapes the plan is the 9 years to the State Pension at 67. Nine years is enough to plan deliberately rather than just endure — long enough that the order you draw from the pots compounds into real money, short enough that you can map it year by year. The £210,000 ISA alone would cover roughly 5 of those years at this income level, which gives you genuine freedom over when the SIPP gets touched.

Putting the margin in pot terms rather than income: at 58 you’d need about £610,000 to land exactly on the £32,700 moderate benchmark. You’re modelling £700,000, so roughly £90,000 of this pot is doing work beyond the moderate standard — that is your cushion against a bad first decade of returns, or the part you could spend earlier if you’d rather front-load your retirement.

Over the full 38-year plan the model projects roughly £173,000 of income tax in total — an average of about £4,600 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.

Each extra £100k of pot at this age adds roughly £3,800 a year to the sustainable income, so there’s a clear payoff to arriving with a little more — or, equally, room to retire slightly earlier if you’d trade income for time.