Retirement Savings by Age Calculator

How the percentile is calculated

Your balance is placed on the distribution of retirement account holdings for U.S. families in your age band, and the result is the share of that band holding strictly less than you. Age bands follow the Federal Reserve’s own brackets: under 35, 35–44, 45–54, 55–64, 65–74, and 75 or older.

The distribution is not an estimate of the survey’s shape. It was computed directly from the 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances Summary Extract Public Data — the same public file the Board’s published statistics come from — by pooling all five multiple-imputation implicates at a fifth of the survey weight and taking weighted percentiles of the variable RETQLIQ, which covers IRAs, Keogh plans and account-type plans such as 401(k)s.

Before these tables were accepted, the same pipeline was run against figures the Federal Reserve has already published, and it reproduces them: a 54.3% share of families holding a retirement account against the 54.3% published, and a median family net worth of $192,700 against the $192,900 published. If the method could not reproduce the Fed’s own numbers, the rest of the curve would not be trustworthy either.

What this calculator assumes, and what it leaves out

• Figures are 2022 dollars from the 2022 survey wave. The Survey of Consumer Finances runs every three years and these tables do not move between waves — they change when a person updates them, never on a date.
• The comparison is by age band, not by income, region, household size or whether a retirement plan was ever offered to you.
• Defined-benefit pensions with no account balance are excluded, on both sides of the comparison. A family with a generous traditional pension and no 401(k) appears here as holding nothing.
• The survey unit is the family, not the individual. A couple filing together is one observation, so a household balance is the like-for-like input.
• Percentiles are read from a 21-point grid of the real distribution. Measured against the full microdata, the answer is within 1.8 percentile points at worst, which is why the result is shown as a whole number and not to a decimal.

Why the median is often zero

In the 2022 survey, 54.3% of U.S. families held a retirement account of any kind. Among families under 35 the share without one is around half, so the median family in that band holds exactly nothing, and the same is true for families 75 or older.

That pile at zero is stored as its own figure rather than smoothed into the curve. Asking what percentile “zero” sits at has no single honest answer when half the group is sitting on the same number, so entering nothing reports the size of that group instead of inventing a rank inside it.

Retirement savings by age FAQ

Other ways to see where you stand

• Net worth percentile — everything you own minus everything you owe, against families your age.
• Income percentile — where your earnings rank in your age group.
• Savings rate percentile — how much of your income you keep, against other savers.
• Debt by age — the other side of the balance sheet, from the same survey.

Sources and review notes

1. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System — Survey of Consumer Finances, 2022 Summary Extract Public Data (variable RETQLIQ, weighted by WGT across five implicates)
2. Federal Reserve Bulletin — “Changes in U.S. Family Finances from 2019 to 2022: Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances” (the published figures this page’s pipeline was checked against)
3. Federal Reserve — Survey of Consumer Finances documentation and codebook

Distribution tables computed from the 2022SCF public summary extract and checked against the Federal Reserve’s published medians and ownership shares before release. The percentile lookup is covered by deterministic unit tests that compare it against exact weighted answers from the microdata. No financial professional review is claimed yet.