Coast FIRE Guides
Practical guides to financial independence and early retirement in the UK.
Coast FIRE is the point at which your existing invested pot, left completely alone, will grow to a full retirement number by the time you actually retire. Reaching it does not mean you stop working. It means you stop saving, and every pound you earn from then on covers only today rather than also funding your seventies.
The reason it deserves its own guides rather than a one-line formula is that almost every explanation online is American. It assumes a retirement age of 65, no State Pension, and unrestricted access to your investments at any age. None of those hold in the UK, and each one pushes the number in a different direction.
Three UK-specific rules change the answer materially: the State Pension replaces a meaningful slice of the income you would otherwise need to fund yourself, private pensions cannot be touched until the normal minimum pension age, and anything you want to spend before that age has to come from an ISA or general account instead. Ignore those and you will either overshoot your target by years of unnecessary saving or discover the money is locked up exactly when you need it.
All guides
What Is Coast FIRE? The UK Number, Properly Calculated
The standard Coast FIRE formula is American and overstates the UK number by about a third. Worked figures including the State Pension, the age-57 access rule and the ISA bridge.
How Much Do You Need to Retire Early in the UK?
A realistic breakdown of early retirement costs in the UK, including the 4% rule, State Pension timing, and common pitfalls.
Coast FIRE vs Barista FIRE: The UK Numbers Compared
Worked UK figures for both milestones, plus the pension access and ISA-bridge rules that decide which one is actually available to you.
How to use these alongside the calculator
Read the guides to understand which assumptions apply to you, then use the calculators to put your own figures through them. The starting points that matter most are your current invested total, your expected real return after inflation, and the age you genuinely want to stop.
One caveat worth carrying through all of this: every Coast FIRE number is a projection resting on an assumed rate of return over decades. Small changes to that assumption move the target substantially. Treat the output as a planning range rather than a precise figure, and revisit it whenever your circumstances or the assumptions change.
Jump straight to a tool: Coast FIRE calculator, FIRE calculator, Barista FIRE calculator, Lean FIRE calculator.