What KiwiSaver fees cost you over time.
Balance after fees
—
Balance with zero fees
—
Lost to fees
—
Your breakdown
Updates live as you type| Input | Value |
|---|
Why a fraction of a percent decides your retirement
KiwiSaver fees feel small because they are quoted as a tiny annual percentage. The catch is that the fee is charged on your entire balance every single year, and it is charged whether the fund went up or down. Over a working life that compounds into a number most people would never knowingly pay. This tool grows your balance two ways on the same return, once with the fee and once without, so you can see the gap in real dollars rather than in decimal points. The contribution you enter is added at the start of each year and then grows, which mirrors how regular KiwiSaver deductions build up.
What the calculator does with your numbers
It takes your return before fees and subtracts the fee to get a net growth rate, then compounds your starting balance and annual contributions at that net rate for the years you set. Separately it runs the identical path at the full pre-fee return. The difference between the two final balances is what the fee quietly removed. The default scenario uses a $30,000 balance, $5,000 a year added, a 6 percent gross return, a 1.0 percent fee, and 30 years.
A 1 percent fee over 30 years, in dollars
On those defaults the fee-free path reaches about $591,313. The same money in a fund charging 1.0 percent a year lands at roughly $478,462. The fee did not cost you 1 percent. It cost you about $112,851, which is close to a fifth of the entire fee-free balance, because every dollar skimmed early never got the chance to compound for the remaining decades.
Comparing funds without fooling yourself
KiwiSaver providers must publish fees in a standard way, so the annual fund fee percentage is genuinely comparable between schemes. The trap is comparing a growth fund against a conservative fund and concluding the cheaper one is better, when the difference is really risk profile, not value. Compare like with like: a growth fund against another growth fund, a balanced against a balanced. A practical move is to open the disclosure documents for two funds in the same risk category and put their fee percentages straight into this tool. If one charges 0.5 percent and the other 1.3 percent on similar holdings, the lower-fee fund usually wins over a long horizon, because nobody can reliably out-earn an extra 0.8 percent every year.
Tax sits separately from the fee
Fees and tax are different drags and it pays not to confuse them. Your KiwiSaver returns are taxed inside the fund under the PIE rules at your prescribed investor rate of 10.5, 17.5, or 28 percent. There is no separate capital gains tax in New Zealand, so you are not taxed again when the fund sells holdings or when you eventually withdraw. The fee, by contrast, is a cost paid to the provider regardless of tax. This tool models the fee only, so treat the return you enter as a realistic after-tax, before-fee figure if you want the cleanest read.
Is the lowest-fee fund always the right choice?
Not blindly. Fees matter enormously, but so does picking the right risk level for your timeframe. A 25-year-old decades from retirement who sits in a cheap conservative fund may give up far more in foregone growth than they save in fees. Match the fund type to your horizon first, then chase the lowest fee within that type.
Do performance fees show up in the percentage I enter?
Sometimes. Some funds layer a performance fee on top of the base management fee, and the headline annual fund fee may or may not include an estimate of it. Read the fund’s fees section in full and, if a performance fee applies, enter a slightly higher figure here to stay honest about the likely drag.