About 529 Decision Center

Most 529 websites hand you a growth calculator and leave. You put in a balance, it draws a curve, and you are no closer to knowing whether to keep contributing, whether you have already saved too much, or what to do with money left over after graduation.

Those are the real questions, and they are hard because the answer depends on your numbers, on rules that differ by state, and on trade-offs nobody lays out side by side. This site starts from the question rather than the calculator.

There are 7 tools, each answering one question:

• Should I stop contributing to my 529? — compare all four contribution paths at once.
• Am I on track? — see your funding ratio and what would close the gap.
• Am I putting too much into my 529? — check whether your current path overshoots.
• How much should I contribute each month? — work backwards from the bill to a monthly number.
• How should I split savings between my children? — work out the split that levels your children up.
• I have leftover 529 money. Now what? — rank the reuse, rollover and withdrawal pathways.
• 529 or a brokerage account? — weigh the 529 tax advantage against keeping your options open.

They share one set of inputs, so answering the questions once lets you move between tools without retyping.

These are constraints on the product, not marketing copy. Each one costs us something.

• No number is written from memory. Every tax figure and cost figure is transcribed from a primary source with a verification date attached. When a rule cannot be sourced, the tool says so and declines to calculate rather than guessing. This is why some answers read “at least $X” instead of a clean total.
• No advice, ever. The tools describe what your assumptions imply. They never tell you what you should do. That is a deliberate line: we do not know your circumstances, and a calculator that speaks with a financial adviser’s confidence is doing something dishonest.
• The arithmetic is not generated by an AI. Calculations run on a versioned, tested engine, verified against an independently written implementation. Explanations sit on top of the numbers, never in place of them.

The methodology page documents the formulas, the defaults and — just as important — what the tools deliberately leave out.

This site is built and maintained by one person, drawing on eight years working in private banking analytics.

The questions the tools answer are not hypothetical ones. They are the questions that came across the desk over and over — whether to keep contributing, what to do with money left after graduation, what a monthly contribution actually needs to be, whether a 529 or an ordinary brokerage account suits a particular family better. They are hard to answer well, they depend on numbers most calculators never ask for, and there was nowhere to point someone who wanted to work through one themselves. That is what this site is.

That experience is analytical rather than advisory, and the distinction matters here. On that side of a bank you build the analysis; licensed advisers are the ones who speak to clients and recommend a course of action. This site keeps the same division on purpose. It will show you the numbers, the assumptions behind them and the trade-offs between your options — and it stops there, deliberately, rather than telling you what to do.

To be explicit about what that means: we are not licensed financial advisers, nothing here is personalised advice, and no part of this site is connected to any employer. See the full disclaimer.

529 Decision Center is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any 529 plan, plan administrator, state agency, brokerage or financial institution, and no plan pays to appear here.

If a figure looks wrong, or a rule has changed, or a projection does not reconcile with your own arithmetic, we want to hear about it. Write to [email protected]. Corrections to sourced data are made promptly and the verification date is updated when they are.