Average 401(k) Account Balances
It's like a case of "Ask, and ye shall receive." After I posted earlier today about the increasing number of 401(k) millionaires and noted that that widely-reported news story only describes the top 2% of the population and doesn't say anything about how well the average American is saving for retirement, I see another article pop up in my newsfeed- this one also from Yahoo! Finance- about the median 401(k) balance (29 Feb 2024). This article shares data from another big brokerage, Vanguard, about the mean and median retirement account balances in 2023, broken down by age range:
Age
Average
Account Balance
Median
Account Balance
Under 25
$5,236
$1,948
25-34
$30,017
$11,357
35-44
$76,354
$28,318
45-54
$142,069
$48,301
55-64
$207,874
$71,168
65+
$232,710
$70,620
* I've copied the numbers directly from the Yahoo! Finance article cited above and cleaned up the formatting with a table
These figures, especially the median figure, are much more insightful into how the average American is saving for retirement. (As an aside, it's not surprising that the mean average is much higher than the median. I've noted before that mean and median are often very different when discussing wealth.) The news is way different from any kind of champagne cork popping about how many 401(k) millionaires there are. In these numbers we see that ordinary Americans lack even one-tenth that much wealth.
Age
Average
Account Balance
Median
Account Balance
Under 25
$5,236
$1,948
25-34
$30,017
$11,357
35-44
$76,354
$28,318
45-54
$142,069
$48,301
55-64
$207,874
$71,168
65+
$232,710
$70,620
* I've copied the numbers directly from the Yahoo! Finance article cited above and cleaned up the formatting with a table
These figures, especially the median figure, are much more insightful into how the average American is saving for retirement. (As an aside, it's not surprising that the mean average is much higher than the median. I've noted before that mean and median are often very different when discussing wealth.) The news is way different from any kind of champagne cork popping about how many 401(k) millionaires there are. In these numbers we see that ordinary Americans lack even one-tenth that much wealth.