What is the average pension pot by age in Great Britain?

Workplace and personal pensions

These are pots built from contributions, the kind a provider shows as a balance. They include pots no longer paid into, and the untaken part of a pot already partly drawn.

The median is the middle pot: half of those holding one held less, and half held more. People with no such pot are left out of it, which is why the share holding one sits beside it.

Each age group is different people measured at the same time, so the rows do not show how one person’s pension grows with age.

All private pensions

Adding final salary pensions gives larger figures, most of all for the age groups likeliest to have one. A final salary pension is counted at an estimate of what its promised income is worth, not as a balance held in an account.

More people hold a pension of some kind than a workplace or personal pot. At 45 to 54, 50% held such a pot and 78% held a private pension of any kind.

Men and women

This table counts every private pension, including any already being paid, so from middle age its figures run higher than those above. It also splits the over-65s in two.

At 55 to 64, the median among men holding a private pension was £193,900, and among women £105,200.

What the figures leave out

• The State Pension, and, in the first two tables, any pension already being paid.
• Northern Ireland, because the survey covers Great Britain.
• Anything since March 2022: each figure is what was held then.

The survey ran during the pandemic, by telephone, and the Office for National Statistics asks for its results to be read with some caution. It also changed how it values pensions for this period, so earlier figures do not compare.

These figures describe what people held. They are not a target for anyone’s own pension.

How a pot grows

The earlier the paying in starts, the longer compounding has to work on it.

How Landfall handles it

Everything you hold sits in one of four kinds of pot: bank savings, a taxable account, an ISA or a pension. The kind matters because it decides how the money is taxed on its way out.