You want to know how your retirement savings compare to everyone else your age. The figures exist, and this article gives them, but they come with a catch. The two numbers most often quoted, the average and the median, sit hundreds of thousands of dollars apart for older savers, and neither one tells you whether you are on track. What follows is the actual data, the reason it splits, and the comparison that is worth more than either: a target tied to your own salary and spending.
The cleanest large dataset comes from Vanguard's How America Saves 2025, which reports on nearly five million participants in 401(k)-type workplace plans as of year-end 2024.
| Age | Average balance | Median balance |
|---|---|---|
| Under 25 | $6,899 | $1,948 |
| 25–34 | $42,640 | $16,255 |
| 35–44 | $103,552 | $39,958 |
| 45–54 | $188,643 | $67,796 |
| 55–64 | $271,320 | $95,642 |
| 65+ | $299,442 | $95,425 |
| All participants | $148,153 | $38,176 |
The Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances casts a wider net: it measures whole households and counts IRAs alongside workplace plans. The most recent survey, from 2022, put the mean retirement-account balance at $333,940 and the median at $87,000 among families that hold retirement accounts at all. Only a little over half of families do. That is worth holding in mind whenever a benchmark makes you feel behind; the tables describe savers, and a large share of households has not started.
Average vs. median: the average is total dollars divided by total accounts, so a small number of very large balances drags it upward. The median is the middle account: half of savers hold more, half hold less. For "what does the typical person my age have," the median is the honest column.
In the 55–64 group the average is $271,320 and the median is $95,642. That gap is not a rounding quirk. It is the shape of the distribution. Retirement balances have a long right tail: a minority of participants earn high incomes, contribute the maximum for decades, and compound their way to seven-figure accounts. Those accounts pull the average toward them. The average describes where the money is; the median describes where the people are.
Both columns also understate what many households hold, because the data is per plan, not per person. In the same Vanguard report, participants with ten or more years of job tenure held an average of $322,237, against $16,434 for those in their first year. A job change often strands a balance in a former employer's plan or rolls it into an IRA, and either way the money drops out of the new employer's numbers. A 50-year-old with three old accounts looks far poorer in this table than at their kitchen table.
The natural instinct is to find your row, confirm you hold more than the median, and relax. The problem is that the median saver is not on track. Take the median 55-to-64-year-old with $95,642. At a 4% withdrawal rate, the rate most planning literature treats as sustainable, that balance supports about $3,800 a year, or roughly $320 a month. Even with another decade of contributions and growth ahead, that is a long way from funding a retirement. (Our guide to the safe withdrawal rate covers where the 4% figure comes from and when it bends.)
Ranking above your peers therefore answers a trivia question, not a planning question. The distribution tells you what is normal. It cannot tell you what is enough, because "enough" depends on your spending, your retirement age, and the income you will collect alongside the portfolio. For that you need a target.
The most widely used ladder of savings targets comes from Fidelity, expressed as multiples of your current salary.
| By age | Target | On a $80,000 salary |
|---|---|---|
| 30 | 1x salary | $80,000 |
| 35 | 2x | $160,000 |
| 40 | 3x | $240,000 |
| 45 | 4x | $320,000 |
| 50 | 6x | $480,000 |
| 55 | 7x | $560,000 |
| 60 | 8x | $640,000 |
| 67 | 10x | $800,000 |
This is a rule of thumb, and it helps to know what sits under it. Fidelity's ladder assumes you save 15% of income starting at 25, hold more than half your portfolio in stocks on average, retire at 67, and want to maintain your pre-retirement lifestyle, with Social Security covering the remainder. Change any of those and the rungs move.
Set the two tables side by side and the finding is uncomfortable. A 45-year-old earning $90,000 should hold about $360,000 by the ladder. The median participant in the 45–54 bracket holds $67,796, and even the average, $188,643, falls well short. At mid-career, "typical" and "on track" are separated by roughly a factor of five. Accordingly, "above average for my age" and "prepared to retire" are different claims, and only the second one pays the bills.
The multiple keys off salary, but retirement is funded from spending, and the two can diverge a lot. A household saving 25% of its income lives on far less than its salary suggests, which cuts the target twice: less to replace each year, and a shorter distance to get there. Social Security tilts the same direction for lower earners, because its benefit formula replaces a larger share of a smaller wage. A pension, where one exists, shrinks the portfolio's job further.
Retirement age pushes the other way. The ladder's 10x assumes the paychecks continue to 67; retire at 60 and you need more than 10x, because the money has more years to cover and Social Security has not started. The more precise method is to build the number from your own budget: estimate annual retirement spending, subtract the income that arrives regardless, and multiply the gap by about 25. Our guide on how much you need to retire works through that arithmetic and shows why guaranteed income often cuts the headline number in half.
The distributions say most people are, so the useful question is which levers still move the number late. Three do most of the work.
Catch-up contributions let savers 50 and older put away several thousand dollars a year above the normal limit, and SECURE 2.0 raised the cap further for ages 60 through 63. Working even two or three years longer moves three variables at once: more contributions go in, the balance compounds longer, and the portfolio funds fewer retirement years. And delaying Social Security raises the monthly benefit permanently; claiming at 70 instead of 62 increases the check by roughly 77%, which shrinks the share of spending the portfolio must carry. The trade-offs behind that decision are covered in our break-even analysis of claiming at 62 vs. 67 vs. 70.
The benchmark tables locate you in the distribution, and the salary multiples give a rough trajectory check. Neither knows your spending, your retirement date, your pension, or your Social Security, and those inputs decide the outcome. The test that matters is not whether you beat the median; it is whether your plan, run against your own numbers, holds up.
That test takes a few minutes. Enter your balances, contributions, spending, and timeline in the calculator and run a Monte Carlo simulation. It replays your plan against many randomized market sequences and reports how often the money lasts to the age you set: a probability of success, measured on your plan rather than the average American's. The rest of the planning guides cover the pieces that feed it.
Enter your numbers and run a Monte Carlo simulation to see how this plays out for your specific timeline and assets.
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