How Much to Save for Retirement

How much to save for retirement is one of the most common questions in personal finance, and it's also one of the hardest to answer with a single number, because the right answer depends on the lifestyle you want, how long you have until retirement, and what you're already relying on the state pension to provide. Rather than offering a vague "save as much as you can", this section breaks the question down using two complementary, well-established approaches: lifestyle-based benchmarks and age-based savings targets.

The PLSA Retirement Living Standards give a tangible, lifestyle-based way to think about your target income — describing what a minimum, moderate, or comfortable retirement actually looks like in practice, from whether you can run a car to how many holidays you can afford each year, alongside illustrative annual income figures for each tier. Meanwhile, age-based savings benchmarks (such as aiming for roughly 6 times your salary saved by 50) offer a quicker, if rougher, way to sense-check whether your current pension is broadly on track without doing a full income calculation.

Both approaches point to the same underlying truth: the state pension, currently £230.25 a week or around £11,973 a year, is a valuable foundation but rarely enough on its own to fund a moderate or comfortable retirement, which is why most people need workplace and personal pension savings to close the gap. The guides below walk through exactly how to work out your own number, whether you're just starting to think about it or trying to catch up later in your career.

If you've never compared your own pension to any benchmark before, start with how much you actually need to retire in the UK, which sets out the PLSA tiers and how they translate into an approximate pot size. From there, the living standards guide goes deeper into what each tier really includes, the age-based targets guide gives you salary-multiple benchmarks to check your progress against, and the late starters guide is written specifically for anyone in their forties or fifties who feels behind and wants a clear, practical plan for catching up.

None of this needs to be worked out perfectly in one sitting. A sensible approach is to pick a rough target using the living standards or the age-based benchmarks, compare it against your current pension statements and state pension forecast, and revisit the comparison once a year as your circumstances change. Small, regular adjustments — increasing your contribution rate when you get a pay rise, tracing an old pension you'd forgotten about, or using a lump sum to top up through carry forward — tend to make far more difference over time than any single big decision made in isolation.