FireMathLab

📊 Net Worth by Age: where you stand, and why

Compare your net worth against typical figures for your age band, and read the caveats, because medians hide enormous variation in property, pensions and inheritance.

FireMathLab
Net Worth by Age
Calculator report
📊 How do you compare?ONS wealth survey 2018–20

The typical UK household aged 35–44 is worth £186,000. At £85,000 you're at 46% of the median, and every check-in moves the bar.

Under 25
£15,700
25–34
£76,000
35–44 · you
£186,000
45–54
£314,000
55–64
£553,000
65+
£503,000

Rough yardstick: household (not individual) total wealth including property & private pensions, Great Britain. Your journey is yours; the only number that matters is your own trend.

Educational projection only, not financial advice. Figures depend entirely on the assumptions above. Generated by FireMathLab · firemathlab.com
📖How to read net worth by ageComparing your position against national figures, why the average is a poor benchmark, and what to do with the answer either way.

The league table nobody should trust

Enter your age and net worth above and the tool places you against typical figures for your age band. People search for this comparison constantly, so it is here, with the caveats attached rather than buried. And the caveats matter more than the gap you are looking at.

Start with the arithmetic of the benchmark itself. Wealth distributions are heavily skewed by a small number of very large fortunes, and those fortunes pull the mean upward, so the average for a band can sit far above what a typical person in it holds. The median (the middle person) resists that pull, which makes it nearly always the better guide to a typical person, and it is often less than half the average.

The figures are also broad and dated by construction. They come from periodic surveys, such as the ONS statistics on income and wealth, vary by country, and are always somewhat out of date by publication. Household versus individual is a constant confusion in this data: a couple measured jointly will look far ahead of an individual measured alone. Regional variation is enormous, and national figures hide it entirely.

Then there is what the number is made of. In most age bands the largest component of net worth is property equity, which depends less on financial discipline than on when and where someone bought; two identical savers, one who bought a flat in 2012 and one who rented, can differ by six figures for reasons neither controlled. Whether the house should count at all splits into two answers: for a net worth figure, yes; for a retirement figure, no, because you cannot spend the house you live in, which is why the FIRE tools here exclude it by default. Pensions distort from the other side, invisible until they are not. Defined-benefit entitlements rarely appear in personal calculations, yet a modest public-sector pension can be equivalent to hundreds of thousands of pounds of capital, so someone "behind" on net worth may be far ahead on retirement security.

Debt hides its own distortion. £50,000 of mortgage and £50,000 of credit-card debt subtract identically here, and are nothing alike; the debt payoff planner treats them as the different problems they are. And the whole exercise measures stock, not flow: someone with high net worth and no income can be in a worse position than someone with modest assets and a strong surplus.

Your own line, not the national one

So, are you behind? Probably not in the way the number suggests. If you are saving consistently and your trajectory reaches your target, the benchmark is noise. The useful comparison is against your own target and your own trajectory: whether you are moving in the right direction month on month, whether your savings rate is high enough to reach your number in a timeframe you accept, and how many years of spending your net worth represents. The net worth tracker exists to follow exactly that trend, and there is a longer read on what to do with the comparison whichever side of the benchmark you land on.

The last of those three measures travels furthest. Net worth divided by annual spending gives years of freedom purchased, and it is directly comparable across incomes and countries in a way a raw pound figure never is. One year of spending covered is a genuine safety net. Ten is independence in sight. At 25× you are financially independent by the classic definition, the 4% rule, which is precisely what the FIRE calculator computes and the 25× calculator turns into a single number.

Priti, Nathan and the same £180,000

Two 40-year-olds, both with a net worth of exactly £180,000.

Priti spends £24,000 a year. Her net worth is 7.5 years of spending, and at her savings rate she reaches 25× in her early fifties. Nathan spends £62,000 a year, so the same £180,000 is under three years of spending, and on his current path 25× arrives in his late sixties.

On the age benchmark they are identical. As financial positions they have almost nothing in common. Any comparison that ranks them together is measuring the wrong thing, which is the core argument for tracking your own line rather than a national one.