What's new — and why your numbers moved (September 2026)

The short version

We put the arithmetic behind your forecast through an independent audit — line by line, against the actual IRS and Medicare figures — and repaired everything it found. Most of it you'll never notice. A few things you will, and this page is the honest list.

Your saved plan wasn't touched. What changed is how it's projected.

Your projected figures may have shifted, because the tax tables were wrong

If you have tax modeling turned on, your run-out date and your projected tax may have moved without you changing a thing. Three corrections:

• The 2025 standard deduction was out of date. It is $15,750 for a single filer and $31,500 for a couple filing jointly, and 2026 now uses its own published schedule instead of an inflation-scaled copy of 2025.
• A deduction for people 65 and older was missing entirely. Current law adds $6,000 per person aged 65+, for tax years 2025 through 2028, phasing out at higher incomes. It's now applied — and it correctly disappears after 2028, which is what the law says today.
• Medicare IRMAA surcharges were understated. The surcharge amounts now use the published 2026 figures rather than holding last year's dollars flat, and the top income band follows the rule that freezes it through 2027.

Which way this moves your numbers depends on your plan. For most people the first two lower the projected tax bill in the near years; for a higher-income household on Medicare, the third raises it. Long projections are steadier too: a future year's tax table can no longer come out lower than the year before it, which used to be possible at low inflation and looked like a tax rise nobody voted for.

None of this is tax advice — it's still an estimate, as Taxes & RMDs explains.

A plan that can't pay its final tax bill now says so

The last year of a projection settles its tax at the end of the plan. That settlement used to sit outside the ordinary accounting: if your savings couldn't cover it, the shortfall was quietly forgiven and the plan still reported On track and ended at zero.

Now the final bill is charged like any other expense, and whatever it can't pay shows as a shortfall — which can mean a run-out date in the last months of a plan that previously looked fine. That's the honest reading, and it only affects plans that were already spending to the very last dollar.

Spare money no longer lands in a Roth

In a month where your income exceeds your spending, the surplus is put into savings. It used to be able to land in a Roth IRA — which isn't a contribution anyone can actually make without earned income and within annual limits. Surplus now goes to cash, then a brokerage account, then a tax-deferred account, and never a Roth. See where a surplus goes.

Social Security ages follow whoever owns the benefit

If the first Social Security stream in your plan is your spouse's, the claiming comparison now measures ages against their birth date rather than yours, and the schedule no longer extrapolates below age 62 (nobody can claim earlier). If those figures looked odd in a couple's plan before, this is why.

Odds of success: the flexible-spending guardrail now fires when it should

In the odds of success simulation, the "what if you trimmed spending after a bad year" comparison measured your withdrawal rate against a balance that was only right in a flat market year. Corrected, so the flexible number may move slightly.

Also new

• [Refunds and credits](/help/refunds-and-credits) — money back on a purchase now reduces what that category cost instead of counting as income, and you can record one by hand.
• [Save messages you may not have seen](/help/saving-your-work) — the app can now say a plan needs a correction before it can save, or that a stored plan couldn't be read. In both cases your edits stay on screen and nothing is written over your saved plan.
• [A fourth "Not ready to judge" reason](/help/plan-confidence) — if everyone in the plan has already passed the life expectancy entered for them, there's no time left to project, so the app says so instead of showing a green verdict over a plan that has already ended.
• Life expectancy is entered in whole years. If your saved plan held a fractional value, we rounded it to the nearest month on load and told you what we changed. See Profile & assumptions.
• Imports refuse to guess an amount they can't read. A handful of unusual number formats used to be read wrongly — and a wrong figure imported silently is far worse than a row skipped with a reason. Those rows are now skipped and counted in the preview.

What you should do

Nothing is required, and nothing switched itself on. If you use tax modeling, it's worth re-reading your run-out date now that it's built on the enacted tables. If a notice is sitting above the tabs, read it — it's specific to your plan.

If a number got worse, we didn't make your retirement worse; we stopped a mistake from flattering it. Estimates, not advice, as always. The previous round of changes is in What's new (August 2026).