Schwab vs. Fidelity Retirement Calculator: The 35-Year Spread

The household

We picked an ordinary scenario: a 32-year-old couple, combined income $185,000, currently with $124,000 in retirement accounts (60% equity, 40% bonds), saving 14% of gross income across 401(k)s and Roth IRAs. Target retirement age 65, target retirement income $90,000/year in today's dollars.

We ran them through Schwab's retirement calculator and Fidelity's Planning Summary tool. Both are integrated with the firms' DIY brokerage offerings; both run Monte Carlo simulations on a 25,000+ trial basis; both produce a "you'll likely have $X at retirement" projection.

Schwab projected an ending balance of approximately $2,847,000.

Fidelity projected approximately $2,675,000.

A $172,000 gap on identical inputs. Why?

What's in the assumptions

The two calculators differ on three meaningful inputs.

Equity return assumption. Schwab's default for an aggressive growth portfolio assumes a long-term real return around 6.4%. Fidelity's, for the same risk profile, sits closer to 5.9%. Half a percent over 33 years compounds to a substantial divergence.

Bond return assumption. Schwab assumes 2.8% real on the bond sleeve; Fidelity assumes 2.2%. Smaller delta but additive.

Fee drag. Schwab's calculator defaults to 0.10% in expense ratios — appropriate for someone holding broad index funds. Fidelity's defaults to 1.00%, the firm's average advisor fee. For a DIY investor, that 1.00% is overstated. Override it manually and Fidelity's projection moves up by roughly $145,000.

After matching the fee assumptions, the remaining gap compresses to about $40,000 — well within the noise of long-horizon Monte Carlo.

Where Fidelity is stronger

Fidelity's tool is meaningfully better at integrating non-portfolio retirement income — Social Security, pensions, annuities. The intake flow asks for projected SS benefit at multiple claim ages and runs the optimization under multiple scenarios. Schwab's tool can model SS income but doesn't optimize claim age natively.

Fidelity's drawdown modeling also addresses sequence-of-returns more rigorously. The Monte Carlo output shows the distribution of outcomes rather than just the median, and the success-probability metric is easier to interpret.

Where Schwab is stronger

Schwab's UI is faster, the assumptions are more transparent, and the tool lets you toggle individual variables (return assumption, contribution growth rate, retirement age) and see the impact in real time. For a sophisticated user who wants to stress-test, Schwab's tool is more responsive.

Schwab's tax-treatment modeling on the Roth side is also slightly more nuanced — it correctly models the distinction between contributions and earnings for early-withdrawal scenarios.

Sequence-of-returns risk

Neither tool makes the sequence-of-returns risk visible enough. A retiree who experiences a 30% market drop in years 1–3 of retirement faces a fundamentally different planning problem than one who experiences the same drop in years 25–28. The math is identical; the consequences are not.

Both tools use Monte Carlo simulation, so technically the bad-sequence scenarios are in the trial space. But neither displays the conditional outcomes in a way that helps users understand how robust their plan is to a near-term market event. A 60% probability of success across 25,000 trials sounds robust until you see that the 40% failure cases are heavily concentrated in scenarios with bad early-decade returns.

What we'd ask for

A retirement calculator worth using should display, alongside the median projection:

1. The 10th and 90th percentile outcomes (range, not just point estimate).
2. The conditional outcome assuming a 25% drawdown in the first 5 years of retirement.
3. The withdrawal rate that produces a 95% success probability over a 30-year horizon.
4. The fee assumption, prominently and editably.

Schwab does (1) and (4) well. Fidelity does (2) implicitly via its success probability but doesn't decompose it. Neither does (3) by default, though Fidelity's drawdown modeling can be reverse-engineered to produce it.

The verdict

Both tools are credible. Schwab's projections will skew slightly higher because of its more aggressive equity-return assumption. Fidelity's will skew lower in baseline scenarios but is more rigorous on Social Security integration and drawdown modeling.

For a planning baseline: run your numbers through both. Treat the gap as the uncertainty inherent in long-horizon projections. Plan against the more conservative number; bank the upside if the optimistic case turns out to be right.

The calculator's job is to make the assumptions visible. Both tools do this — though both have defaults that benefit from being checked.