NRIWallah team
Updated
September 2026
· 3 min read
Indian retirement calculators assume you saved in rupees and will spend in rupees. As an NRI you have probably saved in pounds, dollars or dirhams for fifteen or twenty years and will spend in rupees for thirty more, across an exchange rate that moves throughout and two different inflation rates. This calculator models both sides.
Ask what a comfortable Indian retirement costs and most people give a figure in today’s money: ₹1 lakh a month, perhaps ₹1.5 lakh for a couple who want to travel. At 6% inflation, ₹1.2 lakh a month today becomes about ₹3.85 lakh a month in twenty years, for the same way of life, and it keeps rising for the thirty years you draw on it. That is why the corpus runs into crores.
The most common error is to start inflating from the retirement date instead of from today, which leaves out twenty years of price rises.
Healthcare rises faster
Ordinary spending, on food, utilities, household help, travel and family obligations, rises at roughly 6% a year in the model. Health costs rise faster. Premiums for over-sixties rose so quickly that in January 2025 the insurance regulator told insurers not to raise senior citizens’ premiums by more than 10% a year. At 10% against 6%, healthcare’s share of your budget roughly doubles over thirty years, and it grows fastest when you can no longer earn more.
The falling rupee is not free money
Money kept abroad buys more rupees as the rupee falls. But the rupee falls largely because Indian inflation is higher than inflation abroad, and that same inflation raises the prices you will pay. Measured by what it buys in India, a 6% return in pounds with the rupee falling 2% a year comes to about 2% a year; a 9% return in rupees against 6% inflation comes to about 2.8%.
They are close, so whether to keep money abroad or bring it home should depend on currency risk, tax on each side, repatriation rules and how much Indian market volatility you want in your seventies, rather than on the exchange rate.
Tax when you return
Your NRE interest becomes taxable once you return to live in India. But people returning after a long time abroad are usually resident but not ordinarily resident (RNOR) for two or three financial years, when foreign income stays outside Indian tax. Selling foreign assets during that window rather than after it can make a large difference to the tax, so take cross-border tax advice before you time a sale. The RNOR tracker works out how long yours lasts, and moving back to India covers what the country you are leaving may charge; for Canadian and Australian residents that bill arrives before you have spent a rupee.
How far to trust the result
The arithmetic is exact, but the inputs are thirty-year guesses, and small changes move the answer a lot. The defaults lean cautious, with returns towards the low end, inflation towards the high end and the currency trend rounded down, so the model tends to tell you to save more. Treat the result as a sense of scale and revisit it every few years.
Two things to settle alongside the corpus. The city matters: cost of living compare puts Mumbai about 46% above Kochi for the same standard of living. And if children still have university ahead, the degree cost planner prices that claim on the same savings.
