What next?

For the pensions industry

The Retirement Living Standards will make a real difference to people. For the first time, we’ll all be able to understand our projected pensions income in the context of what we’ll really need to spend on the lifestyle we want in retirement – to picture our future.

The Retirement Living Standards will benefit employers, pensions schemes and providers by:

  • Bringing you a set of independent and robust Standards based on independent research to use in your communications and tools.
  • Helping you make retirement saving tangible and realistic, so you can encourage savers to engage with their pensions.
  • Giving savers more confidence about what their savings will buy them in retirement, leading to easier engagement with their savings.

Our vision is for the pensions industry to deliver these Standards to pensions savers. By 2025, we want to see 90% of active savers belonging to a pension scheme that uses the Retirement Living Standards in its member communications.

You can help pensions savers picture their future by including the Retirement Living Standards in the communications and tools you provide.

We’ll also be working with the Money and Pensions Service and the Pensions Dashboard Delivery Group to make the Standards part of their work.

Please contact us to talk about making the Retirement Living Standards part of your communications. You can find out who is already using the Standards .

For pension savers

Can you picture your lifestyle in retirement?

We’ve created the Retirement Living Standards to help you think in a practical way about what you’ll need or want to spend your money on.

To help you understand where you might end up, our series of examples — show what kind of living standard different people could have in retirement depending on their salaries, household and savings.

And to help you start to plan for the lifestyle you want, here are three ways to get more information about your own pensions savings and how to manage them.

  1. Get to know your State Pension

The full state pension for 2023-24 is £11,500 per year. That goes a long way to reaching the minimum Retirement Living Standard for single pensioners, two pensioners each on the full state pension would achieve the minimum.

Retirement planning, from the Department for Work and Pensions, includes further information on simple steps to take to start retirement planning.

  1. Find more information about how to manage your pension

To help you understand more about your pension and what you can expect in retirement, you could try the following sources of information:

  1. Talk to your employer or pension provider

For most people, saving into your workplace pension after you’re automatically enrolled should mean you can expect somewhere between a minimum and moderate standard of living. If you’re self-employed, you can still contribute to a pension.

Your employer or pension provider can give you more information about how much you’re paying in from your own salary, how much your employer is contributing and how much the government is contributing through tax relief.

You will receive an annual pension statement making these clear. Some pension providers will also have a website and some offer online calculators to help you understand how much you could have in your pension pot by the time you retire.

We’re working with pension schemes and providers to make the Retirement Living Standards part of the way they communicate with you so that you can plan for the lifestyle you picture in retirement.