Coast FIRE vs Barista FIRE: The UK Numbers Compared
Worked examples for the 2026/27 tax year, including the pension access rules that break most US-written comparisons.
The short version. Coast FIRE is the point where you stop saving but keep working. Barista FIRE is the point where you stop working full-time and start drawing down. Coast FIRE is almost always the smaller number, and it usually arrives years earlier, but it buys you a different thing: relief from saving, not relief from work.
Most comparisons of the two stop there. That is fine as far as it goes, but it ignores the part that actually decides which one is available to a UK saver: where your money is held. A £500,000 portfolio locked inside a pension does not fund a Barista FIRE that starts at 45. This page works through both milestones with real figures and then deals with the four UK-specific complications.
The two formulas
Both start from a FIRE number, which is your annual spending multiplied by 25 (the 4% rule). Throughout this page we use a worked example of someone spending £32,000 a year, giving a FIRE number of £800,000 in today's money.
Coast FIRE
Coast number = FIRE target ÷ (1 + r)n, where r is your expected real (after-inflation) annual return and n is the years until your target retirement age.
At 35, targeting 60, assuming 5% real returns: £800,000 ÷ 1.0525 = £236,242. Reach that and you can stop contributing entirely; growth alone carries you to £800,000 by 60. You still have to earn your full £32,000 of living costs from work, every year, for 25 more years.
Barista FIRE
Barista number = (annual spending − part-time net income) × 25.
Same person, same £32,000 of spending, earning £12,000 net from part-time work: (£32,000 − £12,000) × 25 = £500,000. That is more than double the Coast number, but it buys you out of full-time work immediately rather than in 25 years.
What each milestone costs, by age
The Coast number is not fixed. It rises every year you delay, at exactly your assumed return. Waiting five years to start does not cost you five years of contributions; it costs you 28% of the target.
| Your age now | Years to 60 | Coast FIRE number | As % of £800k target |
|---|---|---|---|
| 25 | 35 | £145,032 | 18% |
| 30 | 30 | £185,102 | 23% |
| 35 | 25 | £236,242 | 30% |
| 40 | 20 | £301,512 | 38% |
| 45 | 15 | £384,814 | 48% |
| 50 | 10 | £491,131 | 61% |
| 55 | 5 | £626,821 | 78% |
£800,000 target, retirement at 60, 5% real return. Figures computed, not rounded from a chart.
The Barista number moves for a different reason: it depends entirely on how much you are willing to earn part-time. Every £1,000 of net part-time income removes £25,000 from the pot you need.
| Part-time net income | Gap the portfolio must cover | Barista FIRE pot |
|---|---|---|
| £0 (full FIRE) | £32,000 | £800,000 |
| £6,000 | £26,000 | £650,000 |
| £10,000 | £22,000 | £550,000 |
| £14,000 | £18,000 | £450,000 |
| £18,000 | £14,000 | £350,000 |
| £22,000 | £10,000 | £250,000 |
£32,000 annual spending, 4% withdrawal rate. Part-time figures are net of tax and National Insurance.
The thing about Coast FIRE that nobody says out loud
If you are below your Coast number, investment growth will never get you to it. Not slowly, not eventually. Never.
The reason is arithmetic rather than pessimism. Your Coast number is your FIRE target discounted back at rate r. Each year that passes, it is discounted over one fewer year, so it grows at exactly r. Your portfolio, if you contribute nothing, also grows at exactly r. The ratio between them never changes. A saver at 60% of their Coast number who stops contributing is still at 60% of their Coast number thirty years later, with both figures much larger.
Only new money closes the gap. Which makes the years before Coast FIRE the highest-leverage years of the whole plan, and makes the popular framing of Coast FIRE as “set it and forget it” actively misleading for anyone who has not yet hit the number.
| Annual contributions | Years from £40,000 to Coast | Age reached |
|---|---|---|
| £6,000 | over 40 | — |
| £9,000 | 34 | 64 |
| £12,000 | 20 | 50 |
| £18,000 | 11 | 41 |
| £24,000 | 8 | 38 |
Starting at age 30 with £40,000 invested, £800,000 target at 60, 5% real return. Note how non-linear this is: doubling contributions from £9,000 to £18,000 does not halve the wait, it cuts it by two thirds.
Four UK complications
1. You cannot touch a pension until 57
From 6 April 2028 the normal minimum pension age rises from 55 to 57. Anyone who has not reached 55 by that date is affected, which is everyone born after 6 April 1973. A small number of savers hold a protected pension age from scheme rules that existed on 11 February 2021, but transferring out almost always destroys that protection.
This barely matters for Coast FIRE, where the target retirement age is usually 60 or later anyway. It is decisive for Barista FIRE. If you drop to part-time at 45, you have a twelve-year bridge to fund before a single penny of pension money is available.
2. So most of a Barista FIRE pot has to be outside a pension
Take the £500,000 Barista example, starting at 45 with a £20,000 annual gap and a 5% real return. Funding that gap from 45 until pension access at 57 requires roughly £186,000 held in ISAs or taxable accounts on day one. The remaining £314,000 can sit in a pension.
In other words, 37% of the pot has to be accessible. A saver who has done everything through a workplace pension and a SIPP, because the tax relief is better, can hit £500,000 and still be unable to Barista FIRE at 45. This is the single most common way UK FIRE plans fail, and it is invisible in any calculator that only tracks a total.
The ISA allowance is £20,000 a year, so building a £186,000 accessible bridge is not something you can do in a hurry near the end. It has to be planned a decade out.
3. Part-time work costs you employer pension contributions
Under auto-enrolment your employer must put in at least 3% of qualifying earnings. Dropping from £45,000 to £15,000 of salary does not just reduce your own contributions, it removes most of a matched benefit you were receiving for free. If your employer matches above the statutory minimum, which many do, the loss is larger still.
This is a real cost of Barista FIRE and it does not appear anywhere in the (spending − part-time income) × 25 formula. Coast FIRE, where you carry on working full-time, keeps the employer contribution intact even after you stop contributing extra yourself.
4. National Insurance years
The full new State Pension is £241.30 a week in 2026/27, about £12,548 a year, and it requires 35 qualifying National Insurance years. Ten years is the minimum to get anything at all.
Part-time earnings below the Lower Earnings Limit produce no qualifying year. A fifteen-year Barista phase on low earnings can therefore cost you roughly 15/35ths of the full State Pension, which on the 2026/27 figure is around £5,400 a year for life. Against that, the fix is cheap: voluntary Class 3 contributions, or making sure part-time earnings clear the threshold. But you have to notice the problem first.
Which one actually suits you
| If you... | Lean towards |
|---|---|
| Are under 40 with decades of compounding ahead | Coast FIRE — the number is small and it frees up cash now |
| Have most of your money in pensions | Coast FIRE — Barista is locked off until 57 |
| Actively dislike your job and want out this decade | Barista FIRE |
| Need employer health or life cover | Barista FIRE, if the part-time role carries benefits |
| Are over 50 | Either — the two numbers have largely converged by then |
| Have an irregular or commission-based income | Coast FIRE — it does not require a predictable part-time wage |
There is also a sequencing answer that gets overlooked: for most people these are not alternatives. You hit Coast FIRE first, keep working full-time but redirect the freed-up savings into an ISA rather than a pension, and use that ISA to fund a Barista phase later. The Coast milestone is what makes the accessible bridge affordable.
Three mistakes worth avoiding
- Using nominal returns. An 8% return assumption with 3% inflation is a 5% real return. Coast numbers computed on nominal returns are roughly half what they should be, which is a very expensive error to discover at 58.
- Forgetting that part-time income is taxed. The Barista formula needs net income. £15,000 gross is not £15,000 in your hand.
- Treating the 4% rule as a UK rule. It comes from US historical data with US asset returns and no State Pension in the model. Many UK planners work to 3.5%, which raises a £32,000 FIRE target from £800,000 to £914,000.
Frequently asked questions
Which comes first, Coast FIRE or Barista FIRE?
Usually Coast FIRE, but not always. Coast FIRE is a smaller number the younger you are, because compound growth has longer to work. For a 35-year-old targeting 800,000 pounds at 60, Coast FIRE is about 236,000 pounds while Barista FIRE on 12,000 pounds of part-time income is 500,000 pounds. But the gap narrows sharply with age: by 50 the Coast number is 491,000 pounds and the two milestones are within a year or two of each other.
Can I reach Coast FIRE just by leaving my investments alone?
No. If you are below your Coast number, growth alone will never get you there. The same return that lifts your portfolio also lifts the Coast number you are chasing, by exactly the same percentage. Only new contributions close the gap.
Does Barista FIRE work in the UK if my money is in a pension?
Only partly. From 6 April 2028 the normal minimum pension age rises from 55 to 57, so anyone under 55 on that date cannot touch a SIPP or workplace pension until 57. If you Barista FIRE at 45, every pound of the gap between 45 and 57 has to come from ISAs or taxable accounts.
Do I still get a full State Pension if I go part-time?
Not automatically. The full new State Pension is 241.30 pounds a week in 2026/27 and needs 35 qualifying National Insurance years. Part-time earnings below the Lower Earnings Limit produce no qualifying year at all, so a long Barista FIRE phase can quietly cost you State Pension years.
Is Coast FIRE riskier than Barista FIRE?
They fail differently. Coast FIRE front-loads the risk: your whole plan rests on one return assumption compounding untouched for decades, and you find out you were wrong very late. Barista FIRE is already drawing down, so a bad first decade of returns hurts immediately but is visible early enough to correct by working more hours.
Work out your own numbers
Run your own figures with the Coast FIRE calculator or the Barista FIRE calculator. If you are not sure what your FIRE target should be in the first place, start with how much you need to retire early in the UK, or read what Coast FIRE is for the underlying idea.
Assumptions and sources
All figures on this page were computed rather than transcribed. Unless stated otherwise they assume a 5% real (after-inflation) annual return, a 4% safe withdrawal rate, £32,000 of annual spending and a target retirement age of 60. The 5% real return is an assumption, not a published rate; it is towards the cautious end of the 5–7% range commonly used in FIRE planning. Your own result is highly sensitive to it: at 4% real the 35-year-old's Coast number rises from £236,242 to £300,093, and at 7% it falls to £147,399.
Statutory figures are for the 2026/27 tax year. The normal minimum pension age rise from 55 to 57 on 6 April 2028 was legislated in the Finance Act 2022. The full new State Pension rate of £241.30 a week and the 35-qualifying-year requirement are published by the Department for Work and Pensions; check gov.uk/new-state-pension and your own forecast at gov.uk/check-state-pension before relying on them.
CoastCalc is published by CJ Software Ltd. This page is general information, not financial advice, and it does not account for your personal circumstances. For free impartial guidance see MoneyHelper. Last reviewed August 2026.