The Gap Between Retirement Income and Spending

Updated August 3, 2026. Quick answer: the cushion between income and spending nearly vanishes with age. At 55 to 64 the average household takes in $37,322 more than it spends. At 65 to 74 that falls to $10,651. At 75 and over it is $999 — effectively nothing.

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.

The gap by cohort

What this is not

We are going to be careful here, because this table is easy to misuse. The difference is not a savings rate and it is not dissaving. Income before tax is not money available to spend — taxes come out of it. And consumer expenditure surveys are known to under-report income more than they under-report spending, particularly at the lower end. A gap near zero does not prove households are running down assets.

What the table does show reliably is the direction and the shrinkage: whatever cushion exists at 60 is largely gone by 80, on average.

Why the cushion closes

Income falls faster than spending. Earnings stop; Social Security and pensions replace part of them. Spending also falls, but not as fast, because housing and health do not obey the same schedule as commuting and work clothes. The two lines converge.

What to do with this

1. Plan the shape, not just the level. A plan that works at 66 on average may have no margin at 80. Look at the gap in the later years, not the first ones.
2. Find your own number, not the cohort’s. The averages here span households with paid-off houses and households with mortgages, and those are different lives.
3. Treat the tail separately from the average. Health and long-term care are not average problems and no mean will size them for you.

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Honest gaps

This is a cross-section of different households at different ages in a single year, not the same households tracked over time. It is Interview-survey microdata, so category detail runs modestly below BLS’s published integrated figures. And income is before tax, which is the measure BLS publishes and the one we reconciled against.

The full study and method · spending by age

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.