How long will $1.5 million last in retirement?

Ask this question in three different places and you get three different vibes: personal-finance forums say "forever, you're overthinking it," retirement-industry marketing implies "nowhere near enough, please buy an annuity," and a spreadsheet says "it depends" and then refuses to elaborate. Let's actually elaborate.

The first approximation: divide by your spending

With no growth at all, $1.5 million funds $5,000/month for 25 years. That zero-return floor is worth knowing because every other answer builds up from it — markets, Social Security, and taxes all push the number around, but they push it from there.

Add a real (after-inflation) return and the picture improves fast:

Monthly spending	0% real return	3% real	5% real
$5,000	25 years	38 years	indefinitely
$6,250	20 years	27 years	37 years
$8,000	15.6 years	19 years	23 years
$10,000	12.5 years	14.5 years	16.5 years

(Real return means after inflation — so "lasts 25 years" means 25 years of today's purchasing power. A diversified 60/40-to-80/20 portfolio has historically delivered roughly 3–5% real over long horizons, with no guarantee of repeating it.)

The 4% guideline reads the same table from the other direction: $1.5M × 4% = $60,000/year, or $5,000/month, with historically high odds of surviving 30 years. If you want the withdrawal to survive a 40- or 50-year early retirement, research generally points to 3.25–3.5%, which is $4,000–4,400/month. You can stress-test your own spending against your own balance on our how long will $1.5 million last calculator — drag the spending number and watch the depletion year move.

What Social Security actually changes

Almost every "how long will it last" article models the portfolio alone, and almost nobody retires that way. The benefit reduces your portfolio draw dollar for dollar.

Take a hypothetical couple, both 62, spending $7,000/month. Portfolio-only, $1.5M at a 5% real return carries that for about 27 years — to age 89, cutting it close. But if they claim $4,200/month of combined Social Security at 67, the portfolio's job drops to $2,800/month from that point on — a 2.2% withdrawal rate, which is effectively perpetual. Their actual risk window is the five bridge years between 62 and 67, plus whatever a bad market does during it. The shape of the problem changed completely: not "will $1.5M last 30 years?" but "can $1.5M safely carry $7,000/month for five years and $2,800/month after?" (Yes, comfortably.)

That's also why claiming age is a bigger lever than asset allocation for most people in this range. Delaying from 62 to 67 raises the benefit roughly 30%, and to 70 roughly 77% above the age-62 amount — inflation-adjusted and guaranteed. Run your own crossover on the Social Security break-even calculator.

The risk a table can't show

Every figure above assumes the return arrives smoothly. Markets don't do that, and the order of returns matters enormously when you're withdrawing: a 30% drawdown in years 1–3 of retirement — while you keep selling shares to eat — does damage that the same crash in year 15 doesn't. Two retirees with identical average returns can end up a decade apart in portfolio longevity.

The standard defenses are unglamorous: hold one to two years of spending in cash or short bonds so a crash never forces selling at the bottom, and be willing to trim spending 10–15% in a bad year. Flexible spenders survive sequences that fixed-withdrawal spreadsheets say should have broken them.

The bottom line

$1.5 million sustains roughly $5,000/month by the book, more like $6,500–8,500/month once a typical household's Social Security arrives, and the genuine threats are a bad early sequence and unmanaged taxes — not slow depletion. If your spending is meaningfully below those lines, your question isn't whether the money lasts; it's when you can stop working, and that's a nicer problem. For the full version — your real accounts, tax brackets, claiming strategy, and Monte Carlo across thousands of market sequences — that's what Granary does.

This is planning education, not tax or investment advice; the right answer for your situation depends on details no calculator sees.