When Can I Retire? How to Know If You Have Enough (Canada)
Your number comes from your own spending, not your salary. What CPP and Old Age Security cover, and what your savings have to carry.
You've been saving for years, and no one has ever told you when it's enough. The number you're after starts with a year of your own spending. Take off what Canada Pension Plan, Old Age Security and any workplace pension will pay you, multiply what's left by about twenty-five, and you've got roughly the savings it takes to stop. On $55,000 of spending with $20,000 of it covered, that's around $875,000. Your spending sets the number, not your salary, so two people who earned the same can stop years apart.
Key takeaways
- Your number comes out of your spending, not your income. Everything else hangs off what a year of your life actually costs.
- Between them, CPP and OAS can pay you up to just under $20,000 a year if you're on your own. That's the part you don't have to fund yourself.
- Multiply what's left by about 25 and you have the savings you need. Treat that multiplier as illustrative rather than exact.
- You can start CPP at 60, but OAS won't come until 65, so finishing early means covering those years out of your own money.
How much do you actually spend in a year?
Once you have this figure the rest is arithmetic, so it's worth an hour of your time. Not your salary. Not a percentage of your salary. What actually leaves your account over twelve months, including the bills that only show up once a year.
You'll hear that you need 70% of what you used to earn. No Canadian rule says so. The federal guidance sends you somewhere more useful, which is to set what you spend now beside what you'd spend after you stop, line by line.1
Some of your costs fall away. You're not commuting. You're not paying CPP contributions or employment insurance premiums out of every cheque any more. If your mortgage is finished by then it goes too, and it's one of the largest costs to disappear.
You'll spend more on other things. You've got a lot more hours to fill, and hours cost money. Travel, hobbies, eating out, the grandchildren. Dental and prescription costs that a plan at work used to absorb come out of your own pocket instead.
If you've never added your spending up, start there rather than guessing. Tracking where your money actually goes is the job that makes everything after it possible.
How much will CPP and OAS pay you?
Two cheques turn up for you regardless of how your saving went.
The average new Canada Pension Plan retirement pension at 65 is $877.01 a month.2 The maximum is $1,507.65,2 and you only get near it after a long working life of contributions at the highest level. Most people land nearer the average, and your own statement is the only place your actual number appears.
What you earned makes no difference to Old Age Security. At 65 it pays you up to about $750 a month, and that amount is adjusted every quarter to keep pace with prices.3
What counts instead is how long you've lived in Canada. Ten years here since you turned 18 gets you something, and forty years gets you the full amount.4 At 75 your payment rises permanently, to about $827 a month at the maximum.3
Together that's roughly $10,500 a year of CPP at the average and $9,000 of OAS at the maximum. Just under $20,000 before tax if you're on your own. That's the top of the range, not the middle.
A pension at work moves your number more than anything else you can reach. If yours is a defined benefit plan, the kind that promises you a set amount every month for life, it can cover half your spending on its own and bring the savings you need down to something ordinary.
So how much do you need saved?
Take your yearly spending, subtract the pensions, and your own savings have to produce whatever is left, every year you're retired. Multiply that by 25.
Twenty-five is the shorthand people reach for. It comes from drawing 4% of your savings in the first year and lifting that amount with inflation afterwards. Nothing in Canada sets it and no agency publishes it. It's illustrative rather than exact, and it's still the quickest way to size what you're facing before you get into anything more careful.
Here's how it lands. A year costs you $55,000, and the pensions round to $20,000 of it. You're funding $35,000 a year yourself, and $35,000 times 25 is $875,000.
| A year costs you | CPP and OAS cover | You fund | Savings needed |
|---|---|---|---|
| $40,000 | $20,000 | $20,000 | $500,000 |
| $55,000 | $20,000 | $35,000 | $875,000 |
| $70,000 | $20,000 | $50,000 | $1,250,000 |
Put your real spending and your own pension estimate in and run your own numbers.
Two things bring the savings figure down, and neither of them is a clever investment. A pension at work does it, and so does spending less, because both of them cut the amount you're funding yourself.
How long does the money have to last?
Longer than most plans allow for. If you reach 65, you've got about 21 more years ahead of you on average, which takes you to roughly 86.5 For men it's a little over 19 years and for women a little over 22.5
That's an average, which means plenty of people go well past it, and every year past it is another year your savings have to cover. Finish at 60 and you're asking them to stretch across 26 years or more, and the first five of those arrive before OAS does.
Can you stop before 65?
You can. Plenty of people do exactly that, and it moves the cost of those in-between years onto you.
Your CPP can start as early as 60. Start it there and you give up 36% of it, permanently, worked out as 0.6% for each month ahead of 65.6 Against that $877 average, you'd be collecting roughly $561 a month, and it stays that way.
OAS still starts at 65, and there's no early version you can apply for.4 So if you finish at 60, five years of that $9,000 a year simply isn't there and your savings carry it.
Waiting does the opposite. Every month you delay your CPP past 65 adds 0.7%, up to 42% more at 70.6 That turns the $877 average into roughly $1,245, and it keeps pace with inflation from there.
What can move your date
A partner. Two of you means two sets of CPP and OAS, so the covered part of your spending roughly doubles while plenty of your costs don't. Heating your house costs much the same for two of you as for one.
Your income once you've stopped. Past $93,454 of net world income you start repaying 15% of everything above the line, and by $152,062 you've no OAS left at all, which only reaches you at higher incomes but is worth knowing about before you plan a large withdrawal.7
A modest income. If you're single with income under $22,800, the Guaranteed Income Supplement adds as much as $1,123.17 a month to your OAS, and none of it is taxed.3 That amount is reset every quarter, alongside OAS itself. It shrinks as your other income grows, so it tops you up to a minimum rather than adding to what you've already got.
Which account your money sits in. What you take out of a registered retirement savings plan, or RRSP, counts as taxable income. What you take out of a tax-free savings account, or TFSA, doesn't. Two of you could hold identical balances and not have identical spending power, and the difference can be worth years.
A debt that ends. A mortgage finishing at 68 changes your spending at 68, not before. A plan that spreads it evenly across every year shows you a cost that never actually happens.
What you already own. Your net worth tells you what's on the table before you start adding to it.
Your own CPP amount is the figure that shifts the answer most, and only your statement has it.
What people actually do about the gap
Almost nobody adds these up and finds the number already met. Whatever is missing, there are three things you can change. The date you stop, what a year costs you, or how much you put away between now and then.
Most people with ten or more years left land on saving more. Their savings still have two decades of growth ahead of them, and a few hundred dollars a month has room to turn into real money.
Within five years of stopping, most people move the date or the spending instead. There isn't enough time left for compounding to do much, and working two more years does two jobs at once. It adds two years of saving and takes away two years of drawing down.
Most people with a defined benefit pension find they are missing less than they'd feared, and what's left for them to settle is the date.
None of it tells you what to do. It's what tends to happen once you've got your three numbers side by side and can see which one you're willing to move.
Common questions
Is $500,000 enough to retire in Canada?
At 25 times, $500,000 supports about $20,000 a year from your savings. Add CPP and OAS at their best and you're at roughly $40,000 a year before tax on your own. Whether that's enough depends entirely on what a year costs you, which is why your spending comes first.
Can I retire at 60 in Canada?
Yes. Your CPP can start at 60, permanently reduced by 36%. OAS can't start before 65, so your savings have to cover roughly $9,000 a year of missing pension across those five years, on top of everything else.
How much CPP will I actually get?
The average new pension at 65 is $877.01 a month and the maximum is $1,507.65. Yours depends on how much you paid in and for how long, so it's worth pulling your own estimate before you plan around either figure.
Does my house count toward my retirement number?
Only if you're planning to sell it or borrow against it. A home you keep living in lowers your spending rather than paying you anything, so it changes what a year costs you rather than what you need saved.
What if I have no pension and no savings?
OAS plus the Guaranteed Income Supplement is what you'd be living on. If you're single with little other income you could receive up to about $1,875 a month between them, and the supplement isn't taxed. Both amounts are reset every quarter, and it's worth applying even if you expect only a partial amount.
Further reading
- Retirement Income for Lifeby Frederick Vettese🍁 Canadian
Works through CPP and OAS timing and how to turn savings into an income, with Canadian rules throughout.
- Die With Zeroby Bill Perkins
The other side of the question: the cost of working longer than you needed to.
Sources
- FCACPlanning and saving for retirement: determining how much you need. Accessed 2026-09-02.
- Service CanadaCanada Pension Plan: pensions and benefits monthly amounts, average and maximum at age 65. Accessed 2026-09-02.
- Service CanadaOld Age Security payment amounts, July to September 2026, including the Guaranteed Income Supplement. Accessed 2026-09-02.
- Service CanadaOld Age Security: do you qualify. Age and residence requirements. Accessed 2026-09-02.
- Statistics CanadaLife expectancy and other elements of the complete life table, three-year estimates, table 13-10-0114-01, reference period 2022. Accessed 2026-09-02.
- Service CanadaCanada Pension Plan retirement pension: when to start your pension. Accessed 2026-09-02.
- Service CanadaOld Age Security pension recovery tax, thresholds by income year. Accessed 2026-09-02.
- Service CanadaCanadian Retirement Income Calculator. Accessed 2026-09-02.
Educational, not financial advice. Figures verified against primary sources on the date shown.
See it in a story: "Counting What's Already There," where Joanne adds up a year of retirement and works backwards to the number she needs. The rest of the retirement guides are in the retirement hub.