Peer benchmarking — a rank is not an income
A percentile is not a grade. It is a position.
Being ahead of three quarters of your age group is a rank, not a retirement. Find your band, then
see why the usual comparison fails.
$236,000
75th percentile, families aged 55 to 64, Federal Reserve survey.
$9,440
At a 4% withdrawal — 11.5% of that band’s $82,149 median income.
Where do you actually stand - and what does it fund?
Almost every tool like this stops at a rank. You are ahead of 80% of people your age, well done, share it with your friends. A rank is a genuinely useful piece of information and this tool gives you yours - against families of your age and roughly your income, out of the Federal Reserve's own household survey. Then it does the thing the genre leaves out. It takes your retirement balance, withdraws 4% of it, and tells you what fraction of a normal year's income that actually replaces. Those two numbers are usually much further apart than people expect, and the gap between them is the only one that decides anything.
Before you type anything real: nothing you enter here is stored, logged, or written to any database. Your figures are ranked against a lookup table and sent straight back to your own browser. The shareable link carries a rounded rank and your age band and no dollar figure at all - not your income, not your net worth, not your balance. It is worth being straight about the limit of that: the survey table is public, so a rank still narrows a household to a broad range, which is why the rank is rounded before it goes in the link. A range, never a figure. If you want your own dollars on the exported image you have to tick a box, and that box starts unticked.
The free version gives you the whole answer and never clamps it: your percentile on all three measures, the group you were measured against, and the 4% conversion that says what your balance actually funds. That last part is the entire argument of this tool, so it is free - charging for it would mean selling you the setup and holding back the point.
Pro adds the parts that are about deciding what to do next: the decile ladder, which shows in dollars what each ten points actually costs in your group and how wildly that changes from one end to the other; a cross-section of every age band; and image and CSV export.
The shareable link is free, for everyone, always. Pro is a separate one-time purchase - if you already subscribe to DCA Simulator Pro, this is not included in it. Worth knowing before you click, rather than at the checkout.
Educational content only - not financial advice. Figures come from the Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances (2022), Summary Extract Public Data, wave 2022, and are stated in 2022 dollars - so a balance you hold today is being compared against what families held in 2022, and several years of inflation sit between the two. The survey is a sample, not a census: it interviews a few thousand households and weights them up to represent the country, so every figure carries sampling error, and it deliberately oversamples wealthy families, which is why the averages here are always far above the middle. Groups with too few families in them are suppressed rather than guessed at, and when that happens the tool widens your comparison to your age band and says so on screen. The 4% conversion is a rule of thumb for turning a balance into a rough annual income, not a withdrawal plan, and it does not model Social Security, a traditional pension, taxes, or your own spending. Run your own numbers.
A percentile is not a grade. It is a position.
Every tool like this stops at a rank. You are ahead of three quarters of people your age; well done; share it. A rank is genuinely useful information, and on its own it answers a question nobody actually has.
$236,000
The 75th percentile of retirement assets for families aged 55 to 64 in the Federal Reserve’s survey. Better than three out of four households the same age.
$9,440
The same figure at a 4% withdrawal. Against that band’s median income of $82,149, it replaces 11.5% of the money they live on — about a ninth.
Both of those numbers describe the same household, and only one of them is about their life. Being ahead of three quarters of your peers and having enough are unrelated facts. They feel like the same fact, which is why the rank on its own is worse than useless — it is reassuring in the exact place reassurance is most expensive.
The second failure is the statistic almost every article reaches for. The average net worth of a 55-to-64 household in this survey is $1,564,060. The median is $364,270. Those describe the same population, and 81% of those families are below the average. An average built on a distribution with a tail like that is not a typical household; it is a number that no real family sits near, being quoted at people as a target.
So this tool reports the median, ranks you against families of your age and roughly your income rather than against everybody, and then does the thing the genre leaves out: it converts your position into what it actually buys. 236,000 × 0.04 = 9,440. That conversion is the entire argument, which is why it is free.
Nothing here is hidden. Check every line.
Retirement account balances for families aged 55 to 64, straight out of the survey, converted at 4% and set against that same band’s median income of $82,149. All figures are 2022 dollars.
| Families aged 55–64 | They hold | At 4%, a year | Share of median income |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bottom quarter | $0 | $0 | 0% |
| The median household | $16,000 | $640 | 0.8% |
| Ahead of three quarters | $236,000 | $9,440 | 11.5% |
| Top tenth | $922,000 | $36,880 | 44.9% |
The median 55-to-64 household holds $16,000
That is the survey’s number, not an editorial one, and it is the single most useful line in the table. Half of all families within ten years of a normal retirement age have $16,000 or less in retirement accounts — and a large share of them hold nothing at all, because the distribution does not lift off zero until around the fortieth percentile. Every "average retirement savings by age" headline you have read is describing the tail, not the middle.
Read the last column downward and the rank stops meaning what it appears to mean. Beating three quarters of your peers buys about a ninth of the income that band lives on. That is not an argument that $236,000 is bad; it is an observation that the comparison group is in trouble, and outperforming a group in trouble is not the same as being fine.
One more thing the percentile hides: the points are not evenly priced. Among families aged 35 to 44, moving from the tenth percentile of net worth to the twentieth costs $10,550. Moving from the eightieth to the ninetieth costs $500,850. Same ten points, forty-seven times the money. A rank presented as a ladder implies the rungs are evenly spaced. They are not, anywhere in this data.
What the benchmark measures you against.
Four inputs, no account, no email. Your figures are ranked against a lookup table and sent straight back — nothing you enter is stored, logged or written to any database, and the shareable link carries no dollar figure at all.
Pick the room
Age puts you in one of six bands; income puts you in one of three groups. “Families your age” and “families your age earning roughly what you earn” are very different rooms to be measured in, and the tool tells you which one it used.
State what you hold
Net worth — everything owned minus everything owed, including the home, and it may be negative. Then retirement accounts on their own: 401(k)s, IRAs and similar. A pension that pays an income is not a balance, so it does not belong here.
Read the rank
Net worth and retirement are ranked inside your crossed group. Income is ranked against your age band only — the crossed group is partly defined by income, so ranking it inside itself would be circular.
Convert it
The retirement balance is turned into an annual figure at a 4% withdrawal, and set against what your group actually earns. This is the part the genre leaves out, and it is free on this tool for that reason.
The data, its age, and three things this tool refuses to do
Everything here comes from one source: the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, 2022 wave, Summary Extract Public Data — 4,595 families, five imputation implicates, sample-weighted. Every figure is in 2022 dollars and is not inflated forward. The survey runs every three years, so this is the current public wave and it is also several years old; both of those are true at once and the tool does not paper over the second.
The refusals matter more than the features. Thin cells are suppressed, not estimated: if fewer than 150 families landed in your age-by-income cell, that cell is simply absent, the tool falls back to your age band alone, and it says so rather than inventing a number. Savings behaviour is not scored, because the survey has no honest savings-rate variable — 48.7% of families saved nothing, so the middle of that distribution is exactly zero, and a few per cent appear to save more than they earn because they sold something. A percentile built on that would be fiction across the bottom half of the country. And income is never ranked inside the group it helped define.
The 4% is a convention rather than a law, and it is worth naming which way it leans: a lower withdrawal rate would produce a smaller annual figure and make every position look worse funded. Several modern estimates sit below 4%. Using the higher, more familiar figure is the generous choice, and the reading is still uncomfortable at it. What the conversion cannot include is anything that is not a balance — a traditional pension and Social Security are both real and neither is a pot of money this survey can measure. So read the output as what your own savings fund, not as your retirement income.
Most complaints about this tool are correct.
A benchmark is a claim about a population being pointed at one household, which gives it several genuine weaknesses. Here are the four that actually land.
“The comparison group is doing all the work.”
Correct — and here is the proof, in our own numbers
$236,000 is the 75th percentile of all families aged 55 to 64. Measured against 55-to-64 families in the middle income group — which is what this tool actually uses — the same $236,000 sits above the ninetieth, because that room has no high earners in it.
Same dollars, same age, two very different sentences. Neither is wrong. A percentile is meaningless without the room attached to it, which is why the tool names the group it measured you against every time, and why it tells you when a group was too thin to use and it fell back to your age band alone.
“2022 data is out of date.”
Correct, and it has a specific consequence
The survey runs every three years and 2022 is the current public wave. Every figure here is in 2022 dollars and is not inflated forward — the tool does not guess at what the distribution has done since, because guessing would be worse than being dated.
The consequence is worth acting on rather than shrugging at. If you type today’s dollars against a 2022 table, inflation flatters your rank — some of your apparent progress is just the price level moving. If you want the strict comparison, deflate your own figures back to 2022 dollars before you enter them, and read the harsher number.
“My net worth is mostly my house. I cannot spend it.”
Correct, and it is why two figures are ranked, not one
Entirely right. The survey’s net worth includes the home, the vehicles and everything else, minus the mortgage and the debts — and most of that is not money you can draw an income from without moving out of it.
Which is exactly why the retirement balance is asked for separately and ranked on its own, and why the 4% conversion runs only on that balance and never on net worth. The house makes your rank look better. It does not appear in the number that says what your savings fund.
“Comparing myself to other people is the wrong question.”
Correct, and it is the best objection here
It is. A benchmark describes a population; it does not set a target for a person. Whether you have enough depends on what you intend to spend, when you intend to stop, and what else pays you — none of which is in this survey or in this tool.
The reason the rank is here at all is that people arrive wanting it, and the useful move is to give it to them and then immediately undercut it. Beating this cohort is not an achievement worth aiming at, because the cohort is not doing well. If the rank is all you took away, the tool failed.
Built for people who can hear the second number.
One question, answered properly, once. If what you actually need is something else, the honest answer is that this will not give it to you.
It fits if
- You have read one too many “average retirement savings by age” articles and want to see the median instead of the tail, against a group that resembles you.
- You have a balance you are quietly pleased with and are willing to find out what it pays a year — which is the number that decides anything.
- You are in your thirties or forties and want a sense of the terrain: where the distribution actually sits, and how differently the rungs are priced at each end of it.
- You are comparing your household against friends’ anecdotes and would rather compare it against 4,595 surveyed families.
It does not fit if
- You are close to retiring, already anxious, and looking for reassurance. A rank is not a plan and this tool will not comfort you — what you need is someone to build the plan with, not a percentile.
- You are outside the United States. The survey covers US households only, there is no other country in the table and nothing converts currencies. Your rank would be against a population you are not in.
- Your retirement is mostly a defined-benefit pension. That income is real and it is not a balance, so it cannot be ranked here and cannot enter the 4% conversion.
- You want to know whether you have enough. That depends on what you will spend and what else pays you, and none of it is in this survey.
Where you stand, and what it actually buys.
Answered against what the tool actually does, not against what would be convenient to claim. All figures are 2022 dollars, from United States households.
What is the average retirement savings by age?
It is the wrong statistic, and the gap shows why. For families aged 55 to 64 in the Federal Reserve’s survey, the average retirement balance is $306,404 and the median is $16,000. 77.2% of those families are below the average. A handful of very large accounts drag the mean somewhere no ordinary household lives.
The median is the number to use, and it is bleak: half of all families within a decade of a normal retirement age hold $16,000 or less in retirement accounts, and the distribution does not lift off zero until around the fortieth percentile. Every headline built on an average is describing the tail.
Am I behind on retirement savings?
A rank alone cannot tell you, and this is the trap the tool exists to close. Take a 55-to-64 household holding $236,000 — the 75th percentile for that age band, ahead of three families in four. It sounds like a pass.
Now convert it. At a 4% withdrawal that balance pays $9,440 a year, against a band median income of $82,149 — it replaces 11.5% of the money they live on. Being ahead of most of your peers and having enough are unrelated facts, and the second one is the only one that decides anything. 236,000 × 0.04 = 9,440
What is a good net worth for my age?
For families aged 55 to 64 the median net worth is $364,270 and the average is $1,564,060, with 81% of families below that average. If you have been measuring yourself against a seven-figure number you read somewhere, you have been measuring against a statistic that four families in five fall short of.
Net worth here means everything owned minus everything owed — including the home and the mortgage — so a large share of it is usually not money you can spend. That is precisely why the tool ranks retirement accounts separately, and why the withdrawal conversion runs only on that balance.
What data is this based on, and how old is it?
The Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, 2022 wave — 4,595 families, five imputation implicates, sample-weighted, United States households only. The survey runs every three years, so this is the current public wave and it is also several years old. Both are true and the tool does not paper over the second.
Every figure is in 2022 dollars and is not inflated forward, because guessing at what the distribution has done since would be worse than being dated. That has a consequence worth acting on: if you type today’s dollars against a 2022 table, inflation flatters your rank. For the strict comparison, deflate your own figures back to 2022 dollars first.
How much income does my retirement balance actually provide?
The tool converts it at a 4% withdrawal — a convention rather than a law, and worth knowing which way it leans. A lower rate would produce a smaller figure and make every position look worse funded; several modern estimates sit below 4%. Using the higher, more familiar number is the generous choice, and the readings are still uncomfortable at it.
What the conversion cannot include is anything that is not a balance. A traditional pension that pays an income, and Social Security, are both excluded — they are real and neither is a pot of money this survey measures. So read the output as what your own savings fund, never as your retirement income.
Is my data saved or sent anywhere?
No. There is no account, no email gate and no sign-up. Your figures are ranked against a lookup table and sent straight back — nothing you enter is stored, logged, or written to any database, and the only thing this page keeps in your browser is whether you chose dark mode.
The shareable link carries a rounded rank and your age band, and no dollar figure at all — not your income, not your net worth, not your balance. It is worth being straight about the limit of that: the survey table is public, so a rank still narrows a household to a broad range, which is why the rank is rounded before it goes in the link. A range, never a figure. If you want your own dollars on an exported image, you have to tick a box, and it starts unticked.
Everything above stays free. Pro goes further.
Pro adds the parts that are about deciding what to do next: the decile ladder, which shows in dollars what each ten points actually costs in your group and how wildly that changes from one end to the other; a cross-section of every age band; and image and CSV export.
Paid once. Not a subscription, not a bundle.
Your percentile on all three measures, the group you were measured against and the 4% conversion are free and never clamped. If knowing where you stand was the question, you do not need this. Educational content only — not financial advice.