Plan your retirement across EU borders. Model pension entitlements from multiple countries, cross-border savings, and the impact of currency on your retirement timeline.
Projected at 65
€4.3M
Required corpus
€1.2M
Status
On track
If you have worked in more than one EU or EEA country you have probably accrued pension rights in each. EU regulation EC 883/2004 protects them: periods of insurance in different member states are aggregated when a country assesses whether you qualify, so ten years in Germany and five in Portugal can together satisfy a fifteen-year minimum that neither would meet alone. Each country then pays its own proportional share directly to you at its own retirement age, which means several separate payments starting on several different dates. Nothing is lost by moving, but nothing is consolidated either. The practical task is gathering statements from every country you have contributed in, because no one sends them to you unprompted.
Sources: EU regulation EC 883/2004, Your Europe — state pensions abroad
Benefit levels vary enormously across the EU, so where you accrued rights matters as much as how long you accrued them. Replacement rates — the share of prior earnings a state pension replaces — differ by a factor of more than two between the most and least generous member states, and the contribution rules behind them differ as well. Some countries index benefits to wages, others to prices. Some require a minimum contribution period before anything is payable at all. This is why an aggregate figure is essential before you plan: two people with identical careers of the same length can face very different gaps to fund privately, purely because of which countries their working years fell in.
Sources: OECD — Pensions at a Glance
Your destination sets your cost of living, your tax treatment and your healthcare access, and each moves the target materially. A comfortable retirement in Portugal might run €1,800-2,200 a month where the same life in Switzerland needs several times that. Tax treatment of foreign pensions is not uniform: some countries tax pension income arising abroad, others exempt it under a double-taxation treaty, and special regimes for new residents come and go with the political weather. Healthcare entitlement usually follows the country paying your pension under the S1 arrangement, but the detail depends on your situation. Model at least two destinations before committing, because the difference between them is frequently larger than the difference a decade of extra saving would make.
Sources: Your Europe — healthcare cover for pensioners abroad
Required corpus = (Annual spending − State pensions) ÷ 0.04
Your state pension entitlements are subtracted from your target spending first, because they arrive whether or not you save another euro. Only the remainder has to be funded from your own capital. The calculator projects your current savings forward with monthly contributions and compound growth, then compares that projection with the corpus the remainder requires at a 4% withdrawal rate.
Sofia has worked eleven years in Germany and six in Portugal. Her aggregated state pensions are projected at €1,100 a month. She wants €3,400 a month in retirement, so €2,300 a month — €27,600 a year — must come from her own capital. At a 4% withdrawal rate that is a corpus of €690,000. With €80,000 saved and €1,900 a month at 6%, she reaches it in her early sixties.
Ask every country you have worked in for a pension statement before you model anything. Most expats underestimate the aggregate, because they only remember the country they are in now.
A year of contributions is not worth the same everywhere. Compare the projected monthly benefit per contribution year across your countries before deciding where to keep working.
Where you retire changes the number as much as what you save. €2,000 a month is comfortable in Portugal and thin in Switzerland, and some countries tax foreign pensions while others exempt them.
Do not transfer pension pots across borders on instinct. Transfers can trigger tax and forfeit guarantees; keeping entitlements where they are and tracking them in one dashboard is usually simpler and cheaper.
If you move between countries often, prioritise private savings. State pension rights build unevenly when no single country accumulates a full contribution record.
This projection is a snapshot. Wealthos tracks your accounts across EU countries, converts them into one currency, and keeps the retirement gap current as your entitlements and salary change.
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