Average Pension Wealth by Age in the UK: What the ONS Data Shows

If you're trying to find the average pension wealth by age in the UK, there is one primary source worth using: the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Wealth and Assets Survey. The latest published round covers April 2020 to March 2022 and was released in January 2025. Every figure in this post comes from that release — specifically the ONS Pension wealth: wealth in Great Britain dataset — and the caveats, which are real, are spelled out at the end. The headline numbers first.

Median pension wealth by age: ONS Wealth and Assets Survey figures

Source: ONS, Pension wealth: wealth in Great Britain, Wealth and Assets Survey Round 8, April 2020 to March 2022 (published January 2025). Figures are for individuals with any private pension wealth.

If you came here for one number, it's probably this: median private pension wealth for people aged 25 to 34 in Great Britain is £18,800. Half of 25 to 34-year-olds with a pension have less than that; half have more.

Three definitional points before you benchmark yourself against the table, because they change what the numbers mean. First, these are individual figures, not household ones — unlike the household totals in our UK average net worth by age guide, you don't need to mentally halve them if you have a partner. Second, they count all private pension wealth: active workplace pensions, preserved pots from old jobs, personal pensions and SIPPs, and pensions already in payment, across both defined contribution and defined benefit schemes. Third, they cover people with any private pension wealth — the substantial minority with none at all sit outside the table, and the state pension is excluded entirely.

The 25-34 figure roughly doubled from £9,500 in the previous survey round (April 2018 to March 2020). Some of that is real — automatic enrolment pots compounding through a strong market period — but some of it is the ONS changing how it values pensions between rounds, which we come back to in the caveats section. Treat the level as more meaningful than the trend.

Median vs mean: why the gap is huge

The table above shows medians, and that's deliberate. Pension wealth is one of the most skewed distributions in UK personal finance. A small number of people hold very large defined benefit entitlements or seven-figure SIPPs, and they drag the mean far above the experience of the typical saver. The ONS dataset publishes mean figures alongside the medians, and they run substantially higher in every age band.

The skew is easiest to see in the ONS's own decile breakdowns. In the April 2018 to March 2020 round, median private pension wealth in the top decile of the distribution was £637,500, while the bottom three deciles held no private pension wealth at all. When roughly a third of the distribution sits at zero and the top tenth sits above six hundred thousand pounds, the mean tells you about the shape of the distribution, not about the person in the middle of it.

So when a headline quotes "the average pension pot", check which average it is and whether zeros are included. The honest comparison number for "am I normal?" is the median among people with pension wealth — which is what the table above shows.

DB and DC pensions are blended — and it matters most at 30

This is the nuance most summaries of this dataset skip. The ONS figures combine two fundamentally different kinds of pension wealth: defined contribution (DC) pots, where the number is simply your fund value, and defined benefit (DB) entitlements — final salary and career average schemes — where the ONS estimates a present capital value for a promised future income.

That blending matters for younger readers in particular. If you're 30 and your entire pension is a workplace DC pot, you're comparing yourself against a cohort median that includes NHS, teacher, civil service and other public sector workers whose DB accrual is valued, actuarially, at figures a DC saver of the same age would struggle to match. A few years in a public sector scheme can register as tens of thousands of pounds of "pension wealth" without a pot existing anywhere. In the older bands the effect is stronger still: the 55-64 and 65-74 medians lean heavily on DB entitlements built up in an era when such schemes were common in the private sector too.

The practical implication: if your £15,000 DC pot at 30 sits below the £18,800 median, that's not necessarily the like-for-like shortfall it appears to be — part of the cohort's median is DB valuation, not saved contributions. Equally, don't take false comfort at 45 from beating a median that includes many people who will also receive DB income you won't. The DB share of the figures is also exactly where the valuation methodology is most contested, which is another reason not to read the table to the nearest thousand pounds.

Is your pension on track?

Medians describe what people have, not what they need — and what UK savers have is, by most estimates of retirement adequacy, not enough. Beating the £18,800 median at 30 is a low bar, not a target.

The most commonly quoted rule of thumb is to contribute half your age as a percentage of salary from the point you start: begin at 24 and 12% of gross salary (including employer contributions and tax relief) is the working figure; start at 30 and it's 15%. It's a blunt instrument, but it makes the key point that automatic enrolment minimums — 8% of qualifying earnings, of which at least 3% comes from your employer — were designed as a floor, not a plan. Auto-enrolment, introduced in 2012, is the main reason the 25-34 cohort now almost universally has a pension; it is not, on its own, the reason anyone ends up with a sufficient one, partly because the 8% applies only to a band of earnings rather than the whole salary.

What does "good" look like? At 25-34, having a pot at all, contributing above the minimum, and capturing any employer match available is genuinely ahead of the curve — this is the decade where contributions have forty years to compound. At 35-44, the £39,500 median is where many people realise the gap between "enrolled" and "on track"; a common aspiration is pension wealth around one to two times salary by the early 40s, which for a median earner is comfortably above the cohort median. At 45-54, with the £80,000 median in view, the questions become concrete: consolidating old pots, checking fees, and modelling what your projected pot buys against benchmarks like the PLSA's Retirement Living Standards rather than against other people's medians.

None of this is financial advice — contribution decisions interact with your tax position, mortgage, and everything else. For higher earners especially, pension contributions can do double duty: see our guide to the £100k tax trap for why the effective relief on contributions can reach 60% in one specific income band.

Pensions are a third of household wealth — count yours in your net worth

In the same ONS release, private pension wealth makes up 35% of total household wealth in Great Britain — second only to property at 40%, and well ahead of financial wealth (savings and investments) at 14%. For most working people, the pension is the first or second largest asset they own, and the one most likely to be missing from their mental balance sheet, because it arrives by salary deduction and lives in an account they never open.

Counting it is straightforward for DC pensions: log in to your provider and take the current fund value — that number, updated periodically, is your pension's contribution to your net worth. DB pensions are harder because there's no pot; a rough convention is to multiply the projected annual pension by 20, or to use the Cash Equivalent Transfer Value if you've been given one, while treating either as an estimate rather than a price. (Transferring out of a DB scheme is a separate question entirely, and one where regulated advice is mandatory for good reason.) If you've changed jobs a few times, expect stray pots — the government's Pension Tracing Service will locate schemes from old employers for free, and finding one can move your net worth by five figures in an afternoon.

Our guide to how to calculate your net worth covers where pensions sit in the full calculation. If you'd rather not maintain a spreadsheet, Aureli's net worth tracking lets you hold pensions alongside property, investments and cash in one place, so the 35% of your wealth you can't spend yet stays visible next to the 65% you can.

Data caveats: read this before benchmarking

Credibility cuts both ways, so here is what this dataset can't tell you.

The data is old. The survey period is April 2020 to March 2022 — the pandemic years, when household saving spiked and markets swung — and it was published in January 2025, a lag the ONS attributes to methodological work. By the time you read this, the figures describe a snapshot at least four years in the past. Markets, contributions and inflation have all moved since; the next round will land on different numbers.

The methodology changed, and it's contested. Alongside this release the ONS revised how it values pensions — most significantly defined benefit entitlements — creating what it describes as a break in the series, so comparisons with earlier rounds are not like-for-like. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has publicly criticised part of the revision, estimating that the changes cut measured household wealth by around £2.2 trillion against the previous approach and arguing that the largest single change rests on flawed discounting logic. You don't need a view on the discount-rate debate to take the practical point: the DB-heavy figures in the older age bands are estimates built on assumptions that reasonable statisticians dispute.

Accreditation is suspended. The Wealth and Assets Survey's accreditation as official statistics was suspended from this round onwards while the ONS works on quality concerns, particularly for granular breakdowns. Age-band medians are exactly the kind of granular estimate to hold loosely.

The basis matters. The medians exclude people with no private pension wealth, exclude the state pension, and mix DB and DC wealth. Change any of those choices and the table looks different.

Used with those limits in mind, the ONS Wealth and Assets Survey remains the best public answer to "what do people my age actually have in their pensions" — a far better anchor than survivorship-biased anecdotes. Just treat the medians as a compass bearing, not a finish line: the more useful number is your own, tracked over time.

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Sources:

• Office for National Statistics, Pension wealth: wealth in Great Britain dataset, Wealth and Assets Survey Round 8, April 2020 to March 2022 (published January 2025)
• Office for National Statistics, Household total wealth in Great Britain: April 2020 to March 2022 (published January 2025)
• Institute for Fiscal Studies, £2 trillion poorer than previously thought? Assessing changes to household wealth statistics, March 2025

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