ETFs & Funds
Home›ETFs & Funds›Fund Industry›Most retirement plan participants miss 12% to 15% savi…
Most retirement plan participants miss 12% to 15% savings targets
Vanguard data cited by Yahoo Finance shows only 51% of participants meet 12% to 15% retirement savings thresholds, even as Vanguard participation rates rose to 86% in 2025.
Most retirement experts recommend saving about 15% of pretax income each year, and Fidelity has pointed to age based benchmarks such as having 1x annual salary by age 30 and reaching about 10x to 12x by retirement age, according to guidance summarized by Yahoo Finance.
Yahoo Finance also cites Vanguard's "How America Saves 2026" report, which said the average participation rate across Vanguard plans was 86% in 2025, up 5 percentage points from 2017. The same report found that when it comes to meeting retirement savings targets of 12% to 15%, only 51% of participants hit those thresholds.
While the 15% rule and age based measures are widely used, Yahoo Finance reports that financial planning founder Brian Seymour, a CFP, cautions against treating those benchmarks as a universal scoring system. Seymour said retirement needs depend on factors such as retirement age, Social Security benefits, pensions, existing assets, and spending needs, and that changing any of these inputs can significantly alter the outlook for retirement readiness.
Seymour told Yahoo Finance that savers can work backward from the retirement they actually want rather than relying solely on a rule based spreadsheet. He argued that an income figure combined with modest lifestyle and a pension may require a different savings number than a higher earner aiming to retire earlier with much higher spending.