France: 64, but the climb has been paused
The legal retirement age is on its way to 64 under the 2023 reform, which is why this page opens at 64 rather than the 62 most people still have in mind. It is not there yet, and the timetable has since been rewritten. The phase-in runs by birth cohort, and the 2026 social security financing law, passed at the end of December 2025, suspended the climb from 1 September 2026 until 2028. On the schedule that leaves, anyone born between January 1963 and March 1965 stops at 62 years and 9 months, the steps resume with the cohort born in April 1965, and 64 first applies to those born from 1969.
So 64 is the destination rather than today's rule, and the year it becomes everyone's rule has moved out. Enter your own age if you know it, and treat a projection that runs to 64 as one that assumes the pause holds and nothing else changes.
The régime général and the complementary schemes provide most French retirement income and are not modelled here. Two features of that pairing matter for the number on this page. The legal age is the earliest you may draw a pension, not the age at which you draw a full one: that depends on your contribution quarters, and retiring at the legal age with an incomplete record means a permanently reduced pension. And AGIRC-ARRCO, the complementary scheme, is a separate points-based entitlement stacked on top of the régime général, so a French retirement income is normally the sum of two public pieces before any private saving is counted at all.
Set the income target here to what those two leave uncovered. At a 3.5% withdrawal rate, every €1,000 a year they cover is €28,571 you do not have to accumulate.
French assumptions: a 6.5% nominal return and 2% inflation, a real return of 4.41% a year.