Average Retirement Income

Updated August 6, 2026. Quick answer: average retirement income falls sharply with age, and the more interesting number is what happens to the gap between income and spending. At 55–64 the average household takes in about $37,322 more than it spends. By 75 that gap is $999 — essentially nothing.

Income, outlay, and the gap that closes

Read the third column, not the first. A falling income looks alarming and is mostly expected — earnings stop. What the gap column shows is different and less discussed: the cushion disappears. By 75 and over, the average household is spending essentially everything it receives, which means an unplanned expense at that age has nowhere to come from except savings or family.

Two honest cautions about that reading. These are averages, and both income and spending are skewed by the top of the distribution — the typical household is below both figures. And a closing gap partly reflects households adjusting spending downward to match income, which is a behaviour rather than a hardship. It is a signal worth noticing, not a diagnosis.

Where the income comes from

The composition shifts more than the total does. Earnings dominate at 55–64 and largely disappear afterwards; Social Security becomes the base for most households; and withdrawals from retirement accounts fill whatever remains. That is why the same “average income” figure describes completely different situations at 60 and at 80.

The distribution of what people actually hold is the other half of this picture, and it is stark: at ages 55–64, 43% of families have nothing at all in a retirement account. The percentile table by age.

So what is a good monthly retirement income?

There is no threshold, and the honest form of the question is comparative rather than absolute: is your income enough for what households like yours actually spend? That number is measurable. The median 65–74 household spends $50,068 a year — about $4,172 a month — and it varies more by housing situation than by anything else. Benchmark your own figure by age and housing.

A monthly income that clears your own benchmark comfortably is a good one. A figure quoted without reference to what you spend is not an answer at all.

Sources

Income and outlay from our own extract of the BLS Consumer Expenditure Public-Use Microdata, Interview 2024 — 23,176 consumer-unit records, weighted, with Fay-adjusted BRR standard errors, reconciled against BLS Table 1300 (income at 0.99, totals at 0.978–0.983). Savings-distribution figures from our reconciled Survey of Consumer Finances extract. Both read 2026-08-06 and free to reuse with attribution — the studies.

Honest gaps. These are means, and means in this data are pulled up by the top of the distribution — where a median exists we say so. We do not break income down by source with our own figures: the composition described above is the well-established pattern, not something we computed, and we have not attached numbers to it for that reason. These are 2024 survey figures.

See methodology and corrections. General information, not financial advice. No advertising appears on this page.