Women reach 67 with £105,000 in pension savings, men with £232,000, UK figures show

A woman in Britain will reach the state pension age of 67 with about £105,000 in private pension savings. A man will reach it with about £232,000. The £127,000 difference, published by Mercer on 26 March 2026 from analysis by its now:pensions business and the Pensions Policy Institute, means women arrive at retirement with nearly 55 per cent less than men.

The annual figures are starker than the stock figures. On the same analysis that pot converts to £6,176 a year of private pension income for a woman and £17,846 for a man. Women are also expected to live longer, to 83 against 79, and to spend 17 years in retirement from age 66 rather than 13. The smaller sum has to last four years longer. The full state pension is put at £12,547.60 a year in 2026 and the basic state pension at £9,629.00, which for many women is close to the whole of their retirement income.

Official statistics tell a similar story with different numbers. The Department for Work and Pensions published Gender Pensions Gap in Private Pensions: 2020 to 2022 on 21 July 2025, only the second release in an ad hoc series that began with 2018 to 2020 data. It measures the gap among people aged 55 to 59 who hold uncrystallised private pension wealth, and puts it at 48 per cent: a median of £81,000 for women and £156,000 for men.

The two numbers, 48 and 55, are less a contradiction than a warning about method. The department notes that a change in how defined benefit pensions are valued reduced its measured gap by seven percentage points, from 55 per cent under the old approach to 48 under the new one, and cautions that trends over time from the Wealth and Assets Survey should be treated carefully given methodological changes. Part of the gap closed on paper without anyone saving more.

What the official figures rule out is a participation story. The department reports that among eligible employees in 2023, participation was equal for men and women, at 86 per cent in the private sector and 93 per cent in the public sector. Around normal minimum pension age, 78 per cent of women and 82 per cent of men held some private pension wealth. Women are in the system. They are in it with less money.

The mechanism now:pensions points to is the architecture of automatic enrolment itself. A worker must earn £10,000 in a single job to be enrolled, and contributions are calculated only on earnings above £6,240. now:pensions says 79 per cent of part-time working women earn below the £10,000 trigger, against 9 per cent of part-time working men. The Pensions Policy Institute estimates that removing the trigger and the lower earnings limit would bring 726,000 more women into automatic enrolment and up to £218 million a year in extra contributions, and that had those measures applied from the scheme's start in 2012, women would hold £7.7 billion more.

The government has gone the other way, by standing still. On 18 December 2025 the department published its review of the automatic enrolment earnings trigger and qualifying earnings band for 2026 to 2027 and held the trigger at £10,000, with the band running from £6,240 to £50,270. The supporting analysis projects private sector participation of 16.9 million, an increase of around 39,000 compared with 2025 to 2026. It reports that total without breaking the effect down by sex.

Divorce is the other lever. On 5 January 2026 now:pensions published institute analysis finding that divorced women hold median pension wealth of £32,640 against £85,800 for divorced men, or 39 per cent. It found that only 11 per cent of more than 100,000 divorces in 2024 to 2025 involved a pension attachment order, and that about 71 per cent of settlements left pensions out altogether.

Australia measures the same gap in a system without a British style earnings trigger and finds it smaller but stubborn. The Super Members Council, drawing on the Australian Taxation Office sample file for 2022 to 2023, on a page last updated 16 April 2026, puts the median superannuation balance of women aged 60 to 64 at $189,900 against $254,600 for men, a gap of 25 per cent, or about $51,000. Across workers aged 20 to 64 the medians are $53,800 and $72,500, a gap of 26 per cent. Superannuation has been paid on Commonwealth Parental Leave Pay since 1 July 2025, which the council projects will leave a mother of two between $12,500 and $14,500 better off at retirement.

Much remains unsettled. The March 2026 figures were released ahead of a full report that had not appeared by 17 August 2026, so the modelling behind the £105,000 and £232,000 projections cannot yet be interrogated. The official series is ad hoc rather than annual, and its most recent data stops in 2022. And now:pensions itself concedes that scrapping the earnings trigger needs to be considered "in the round, including timing, sequencing, and the impact on lower earners", which is another way of saying that nobody has yet shown who pays.