"How much super do I need to retire?" is one of those questions that seems like it should have a single answer. It doesn’t. Different lifestyles, different ages, different assumptions about the age pension all change the number by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Let’s be specific about three retirement scenarios for Australians, with real maths.
The benchmarks
The Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia (ASFA) publishes quarterly retirement standards. As of late 2025, they look something like this for a couple owning their home:
- Modest retirement: $48,000 a year. Covers basics. Limited travel, older car, careful with discretionary spending.
- Comfortable retirement: $76,000 a year. One overseas trip every couple of years, regular dining out, decent car, good health insurance.
- Premium retirement: $100,000+ a year. Travel often, eat out regularly, replace cars on the dot, no scrimping.
Singles need roughly 70% of these figures.
How much super gets you there
The rough rule is your super (plus any other invested assets) needs to be 16 to 25 times your annual spend, depending on age, life expectancy, and how much you assume from the age pension.
For a couple aiming to retire at 65, owning their home, and willing to draw the age pension once eligible:
- Modest: about $300,000 in combined super
- Comfortable: about $690,000 combined
- Premium: about $1,500,000+ combined
If you want to retire at 60, before the age pension kicks in (currently age 67), you need significantly more, because you’re self-funding for those 7 years.
- Modest at 60: about $500,000 combined
- Comfortable at 60: about $1,000,000 combined
- Premium at 60: about $1,800,000+ combined
If you don’t own your home, add another $300k to $500k to cover rent in retirement.
Where most Australians actually are
The honest numbers are sobering. The median super balance for an Australian aged 60 to 64 is currently around $200,000 for men and $145,000 for women. Most people are looking at modest-to-uncomfortable retirement on those balances, leaning heavily on the age pension.
This isn’t to alarm you. It’s to point out that the gap between where most people end up and where they want to end up is real, and the only way to close it is to know your number and work toward it.
The compounding window
If you’re in your 30s or 40s, a small change now is worth a lot at 60. The annual concessional contribution cap is $30,000 (as of 2025-26), which includes your employer’s 11.5% Super Guarantee. Anything you don’t use, you can carry forward for 5 years if your balance is under $500k.
An extra $5,000 a year in super, salary-sacrificed, at age 35, is worth roughly $190,000 in retirement at age 65. The same $5k a year started at 50 is worth about $90k. Time matters more than amount.
Salary sacrifice has the added benefit of being taxed at 15% inside super instead of your marginal rate. For someone on the 37% bracket, that’s a 22 percentage point tax saving on the contribution itself.
What Funance does
The Assets tab tracks your super alongside your other invested assets, with growth projections at 1, 3, 5 and 10 year horizons. The Advice engine flags:
- If your contribution rate is below what’s needed for your retirement target
- Carry-forward concessional cap room you may have unused
- Whether you’re paying high admin fees on a legacy fund
- Whether your current trajectory hits the comfortable benchmark, modest, or neither
The numbers are based on your actual balance and contribution rate, not generic benchmarks. That’s the bit that makes it useful.
What to do this week
Three steps.
First, find your current super balance. Add up all funds if you’ve got more than one (which most people do, and which is also leaking fees you should be combining away).
Second, pick a number for what you want to retire on. Use the ASFA benchmarks as a starting point. Comfortable for a couple is $76k a year, ballpark.
Third, work out the gap. The rough multiplier I gave you above (16 to 25 times annual spend) gets you a target balance. Subtract your current. Divide by years remaining. That’s how much you need to add per year, in real terms, to get there.
If the gap looks impossible, that’s information. It tells you to either work longer, spend less in retirement, or save more aggressively now. None of those are fun, but knowing is much better than not knowing.
The earlier you have this conversation with yourself, the more options you have. At 35, you can fix it with $5k a year of salary sacrifice. At 55, you’re looking at $30k a year and it still might not close the gap. Time is the real lever here, and it’s the only one that runs in one direction.