7 Best Free UK Investing & Tax Tools in 2026

What it solves: The single most quietly motivating number in personal finance — the size of pot where you've already "won", even if you stop contributing today.

Coast FIRE is where your invested pot is big enough that compounding alone, between now and your target retirement age, will get you to a full FIRE number. You can stop adding new money and the maths still works.

What makes the UK version different:

• Realistic post-tax real return assumptions, not the 7% nominal default every US calculator uses
• UK pension access age (currently 57 from 2028, rising with state pension age) baked into the timeline
• Inflation handled in real terms — your number stays comparable to today's spending

I check mine roughly once a year. It's a useful reality check on whether the next pay rise should go to lifestyle or to the index funds.

What it solves: "How much do I actually need to retire in the UK?"

The standard answer is "25× your annual spending" and it isn't wrong, but it's a US import. Once you account for the way UK decumulation works — the 25% tax-free pension lump sum, ISA withdrawals being entirely tax-free, GIA dividends and gains being taxed, the personal allowance reset each year in retirement — the picture shifts.

This calculator handles:

• 4% rule with adjustable safe withdrawal rate (test 3.5% if you're nervous, 4.5% if you're brave)
• Split between ISA, SIPP and GIA pots — because the tax behaviour differs in each
• UK inflation assumption, not US CPI
• A sanity check on whether your current trajectory hits the number by your target age

If you've never put your real numbers into one of these, it's worth ten minutes. The shape of the answer is often surprising — either reassuring or kicking, depending on where you are.

What it solves: The CGT annual exempt amount has been gutted from £12,300 to £3,000 in two years, and most UK investors with holdings in a GIA still don't realise how easy it is to wander past that threshold by accident.

This one plans disposals against the £3,000 allowance for 2026/27. It's the tool I keep open when I'm rebalancing or trimming a position outside an ISA.

Key things it does:

• Models partial disposals to use the allowance exactly — sell just enough, leave the rest to crystallise next tax year
• Factors in carried-forward losses
• Models inter-spouse transfers (a married couple effectively has two allowances)
• Exports a branded PDF — useful if you have an accountant or are sharing this with an adviser

Spousal transfers between partners are still tax-free on the date of transfer. If you're married and one partner has unused allowance, this is the simplest CGT mitigation move in the UK toolkit and almost no one talks about it.

What it solves: If you hold investments in a General Investment Account (GIA), every gain is taxable and every dividend over £500 is taxable. The same holdings inside a Stocks & Shares ISA are entirely tax-free, forever.

Bed-and-ISA is the standard move to fix that — sell from the GIA, buy back the same holding inside the ISA, in a single instruction (most platforms do this in one click and waive the second commission). You crystallise the gain, you may owe CGT on it now, but every penny of future growth is sheltered.

The calculator answers the actual question: is the tax bill now worth the long-term saving?

• Models the immediate CGT bill based on the gain and your other usage
• Projects the long-term tax saving on dividends and future gains inside the ISA
• Shows the break-even horizon — how many years until the move pays for itself

It's almost always worth it if you've got room in your ISA allowance and the gain is modest. The calculator gives you the actual figures rather than the "it depends" hand-wave you get from most articles.

What it solves: From 6 April 2027, most unused pension pots become part of the deceased's estate for inheritance tax. If the pension holder dies after 75, beneficiaries also pay income tax on what they draw at their marginal rate. Stack those and the effective hit can land at 64–67%.

That's not hyperbole. It's an actual outcome that's going to surprise a lot of UK families when the first real cases come through. I built this one specifically because the existing calculators online either ignore the income-tax-on-top layer entirely or quietly assume the beneficiary is a basic-rate taxpayer with no other income, which is usually wrong.

The tool covers:

• Your specific pot size and current estate value
• Spousal exemption assumptions (transfers between spouses remain IHT-free)
• Beneficiary's expected marginal rate when they draw — the bit most others miss
• Mitigation routes worth modelling: spending it down, gifting from income, increasing partner pension contributions, life insurance in trust

None of this is fun. But pretending it isn't happening is what costs families six-figure sums. If you're over 60 with a meaningful DC pot, you should know your exposure. Pair this with the gov.uk IHT pages for the current thresholds.

What it solves: The calculators above answer specific questions. WealthR is the thing that holds the picture together — your actual net worth, month by month, with pensions, ISAs, GIAs, crypto, property equity, debts and FIRE progress all in one place.

I built it because I'd been tracking my own net worth in a sprawling spreadsheet for over a decade and finally got tired of it. The free tier covers:

• Net worth tracking across as many accounts as you want
• Investment, pension and property modules (DC, SIPP, LISA, Defined Benefit all supported)
• FIRE projector with monthly contribution breakdown
• The new Retirement Portfolio panel — toggle exactly which pots and assets count toward your retirement number (full pension only, FIRE-lean, include property if you'd downsize at retirement, etc.)
• No bank linking, no Open Banking, no account aggregation — you enter the numbers, you own the data

The Pro tier exists for things that genuinely needed a paid layer — adviser share links (a read-only snapshot of your finances you can send your IFA), per-child Junior ISA tracking, a few advanced views. But you can do the entire core of personal finance tracking on the free tier indefinitely, and that's the point.

If you've read any of the rest of this blog, you'll know I'm sceptical of finance apps that treat your data as a product. WealthR doesn't sell data. There are no ads inside the app (only on the public blog, to keep the lights on). Your numbers stay yours.

What it solves: The single most underused free tool in UK personal finance — your own actual records, straight from HMRC, free, official, and frequently more accurate than whatever you've reconstructed in a spreadsheet.

I'm including this one because no curated list of UK money tools is honest without it, and almost nobody mentions it. The HMRC Personal Tax Account gives you:

• Your State Pension forecast — the actual figure based on your real NI record, not an estimate
• National Insurance qualifying years (and crucially, gaps you can fill voluntarily)
• Your current tax code and PAYE position
• Income from previous tax years, useful for verifying CGT base costs or pension allowance carry-forward

Half the FIRE calculations I see online are off because the user has plugged in a guessed State Pension figure. Spend ten minutes signing up and you'll have the real number forever.