Age Pension Calculator

Most people approaching retirement have the same two questions about the Age Pension. Will I get it, and how much. The rules that answer them are entirely public, but they are spread across dozens of pages and written for the assessors applying them rather than the people being assessed. So the questions usually get answered by a phone queue, a financial adviser, or a guess.

Julie Clune decided to answer them properly. A former Services Australia employee and long-time IT teacher, she built the whole assessment as an Excel model: the same rates, the same deeming steps, the same two tests and the same rule that the lower result wins. Not a black box that spits out a number, but a working model of how the assessment is actually done. This site is a passion project to get that model in front of the people who need it, and DeCODE built it.

The brief was unusual and refreshingly clear. Reproduce the model exactly. Do not simplify it, do not round it off, and do not hide the arithmetic. Whatever the site shows a visitor has to match what Julie’s spreadsheet produces, and the visitor has to be able to see how it got there.

So the estimators were written as a custom plugin rather than assembled from an off-the-shelf calculator. There are two of them. The simple estimator takes three inputs, financial assets, other assets and any other income, and returns a fortnightly figure in under two minutes with charts showing where you sit against the cut-offs. The advanced estimator is a seven-step walk-through of income, superannuation, financial assets, other assets and excluded assets, itemised the way Services Australia assesses them, and it handles the awkward cases: account-based pensions, defined benefit schemes and lifetime income streams. A live summary bar keeps the running result visible as you work through it.

Both then show the working. The assets test and the income test are laid out step by step with the free areas, the taper rates and the cut-offs that applied to each number, so the result is auditable rather than something you have to take on faith. That transparency is the entire point of the site, and it is what separates it from every other pension calculator online.

Everything runs in the visitor’s browser. Nothing is sent to a server, nothing is stored, and there is no sign-up. For a tool where people are entering their savings, their super balance and what their house contents are worth, that was not a feature to be added later. It was a design constraint from the start. If someone does want a copy of their result, a single Gravity Form asks whether to email it, and that is the only thing that ever leaves the page.

Around the estimators sits the reference material that makes the numbers make sense: a plain-English guide to the two tests and deeming, a current-rates panel, an FAQ, a resources section and a clear disclaimer that this is a guide rather than financial advice. Every threshold is taken from the Services Australia Guide to Australian Government Payments, the edition in use is displayed at the top of each estimator, and the figures are reviewed after each indexation on 20 March, 1 July and 20 September.

It is a good example of what a website can be when it is not selling anything. One person’s expertise, built carefully, given away free, and useful from the first click.