Updated August 3, 2026. Quick answer: housing is the largest single category of retirement spending and it grows as a share of the budget with age — from 30 percent at 55 to 64 to 37 percent at 75 and over. The thing that most changes what a household spends is not its age. It is whether there is still a mortgage.
What these numbers are. Computed by Clear Money Guide from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Public-Use Microdata, Interview survey, 2024 (released 2025). Figures are annual means per consumer unit, weighted with FINLWT21, with standard errors from the 44 balanced-repeated-replication weights. Our totals reconcile to BLS’s own published Table 1300 within about 2 percent. The Interview survey is not the whole survey — BLS’s published table also folds in the Diary survey — so our category figures run slightly below theirs, which we state page by page rather than hide.
One disclosure specific to this page. Our housing figure runs about 8.5 percent below BLS’s published number in every cohort, consistently, because some housing components are collected in the Diary survey we do not have. Treat the dollar levels as a floor and the comparisons between groups — which is what this page is actually about — as sound.
The mortgage is the dividing line
Ages 65 to 74, by housing tenure:
| Tenure | Total spending | Housing spending | Households in sample |
|---|---|---|---|
| Owned with mortgage | $78,173 | $25,927 | 1,290 |
| Owned without mortgage | $66,503 | $18,928 | 2,119 |
| Rented | $40,425 | $16,959 | 892 |
| Occupied without payment of cash rent | $28,216 | $7,801 | 36 |
And 75 and over:
| Tenure | Total spending | Housing spending | Households in sample |
|---|---|---|---|
| Owned with mortgage | $66,664 | $26,336 | 594 |
| Owned without mortgage | $55,459 | $17,683 | 1,967 |
| Rented | $44,935 | $22,984 | 696 |
| Occupied without payment of cash rent | $33,030 | $5,877 | 35 |
Tenure categories are BLS’s own, read from the CE data dictionary. Groups with fewer than 30 sampled households are suppressed rather than published as though they were estimates.
What the tables actually say
At 65 to 74, a household still carrying a mortgage spends $78,173 in total against $66,503 for an outright owner. That is a difference of roughly a sixth of the entire budget, attributable to one line item.
Renters spend the least in total — which is not a finding that renting is cheaper. Renting households in these cohorts have lower incomes, and lower spending follows lower income. The tenure table describes different populations, not the same household under different arrangements, and reading it as a keep-or-sell answer would be a mistake.
The one lever with a known size
Most retirement advice about housing is speculative. This is not: entering retirement without a mortgage payment is worth, in this data, something on the order of ten thousand dollars a year of spending pressure. That is a bigger and more certain effect than almost anything on the investment side of the ledger.
The full study · income versus spending
Cite this
Clear Money Guide, “What Retirees Actually Spend: CE PUMD 2024 Interview-survey estimates”, August 3, 2026. Method pre-registered before computation; computation script and reconciliation against BLS Table 1300 published with the study.
General information drawn from the Internal Revenue Code, Treasury regulations and IRS publications, not legal or tax advice. Thresholds and dollar figures are adjusted regularly and several of the rules here turn on facts this page cannot see, so check the current year before you act on a number.