PRSA fee calculator

What this calculator does

Pension charges are quoted as small percentages, which makes them hard to weigh against each other. This tool converts those percentages into euro. It takes the charges a provider has actually published in the Pensions Authority register, applies them to the contributions and time horizon you enter, and shows the resulting fund alongside what the same contributions would produce with no charges at all. The gap between the two figures is what the charges cost over the period.

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The two charges it models

A contribution charge is a one-off percentage taken from each payment before it is invested. At a 5% contribution charge, €95 of every €100 reaches your fund. Its real cost is larger than it looks, because the €5 that never arrives also never compounds — the earlier a contribution is made, the more that missing growth matters.

An annual management charge is a percentage of your whole accumulated fund, taken every year you hold the product. It applies to contributions made decades ago as well as to recent ones. In effect it reduces your growth rate: a fund growing at 5% a year with a 1% AMC compounds at roughly 3.95%, and across thirty years that difference is measured in tens of thousands of euro rather than percentage points.

Many products publish a range rather than a single figure, because the rate depends on the contribution tier or the fund selected. Where that is the case, this calculator illustrates both ends of the published range so you can see the spread.

The assumptions behind the numbers

The illustration applies a single fixed growth rate every year for the whole period. Real investment returns are nothing like that — they vary year to year and can be negative. A constant rate is used deliberately, because the purpose here is to isolate the effect of the charge. Holding growth steady is what makes two charge levels comparable; it is not a forecast of what any fund will do.

The figures also exclude several things that matter to a real outcome:

• Tax relief on your contributions, which for many people is the largest single factor in what a pension actually costs them. See tax relief by age.
• Inflation. All figures are in today's euro with no adjustment, so a fund value thirty years out will not buy what the same number buys now.
• Fund choice and investment performance, which typically move the outcome more than the charge does.
• Future changes to charges, contribution levels, or the rules themselves.
• Costs outside the register, including fund transaction costs and anything agreed separately with a broker or adviser.

What the calculator is good for is the narrow question it answers: holding everything else equal, how much of a fund does a given published charge consume over a given number of years. That is a question about arithmetic, and the arithmetic is reliable. Everything else about choosing a pension is a question for an adviser regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland.

Related pages

• Compare PRSA charges — the full table of published charges for every approved product.
• How pension fees compound — the same arithmetic explained with worked examples.
• Standard vs non-standard PRSAs — why some products are capped at 1% and others are not.
• What is a PRSA? — the basics of the product.
• Reference figures — contribution limits, the Standard Fund Threshold and State Pension rates.