The distance between $167,970 and $44,115 is the architecture of American inequality, expressed in retirement savings data—a small cohort of high-balance savers dragging the average skyward while the rest of the country lives in the median.
So whose fault is it? Here is where Vanguard’s own 25 years of data become uncomfortable for the system it serves.
Many low-income earners “really want me to sit down and explain how it worked for them, because they’ve just been excluded from a system like this for their whole careers,” she said. “They want to know what the catch is.”
After 25 years of data, a 33-to-1 gap against what people believe they need, six straight years of rising hardship withdrawals, and a retirement architecture that still leaves tens of millions of workers outside the door, Vanguard’s most unsettling finding may be the simplest one: we have known about this problem for a very long time. We just haven’t fixed it.
Vanguard’s How America Saves 2026 is based on data from nearly 5 million defined contribution plan participants across Vanguard-administered plans as of year-end 2025.
For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
