The short answer: the Retirement Living Standards put a Minimum retirement at £13,900 a year for a single person, a Moderate one at £32,700, and a Comfortable one at £45,400. For a couple the figures are £22,500, £45,400 and £62,700. They are spending figures, not income figures, and they assume you own your home outright.
Where these numbers come from
The Retirement Living Standards are the closest thing the UK has to an authoritative answer. They are overseen by Pensions UK, formerly the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association, and calculated by the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University under Professor Matt Padley.
They matter because of how they are built. Rather than an industry body picking a number, the research uses groups of ordinary members of the public to agree what goods and services a household genuinely needs at each level. It is a bottom-up basket of real spending, not a rule of thumb like "two thirds of your salary". The figures below were updated on 3 June 2026.
The figures
| Standard | Single | Couple | Single, London |
|---|---|---|---|
| Minimum | £13,900 | £22,500 | £14,600 |
| Moderate | £32,700 | £45,400 | £34,000 |
| Comfortable | £45,400 | £62,700 | £47,200 |
Each level is costed across six categories: house (bills, council tax, insurance, maintenance, furniture), food and drink (groceries, eating out), transport (car costs, rail, taxis), holidays and leisure, clothing and personal (including hygiene and health), and helping others (gifts and charitable giving).
That last category is worth noticing. The research treats being able to give something to your family or a charity as part of a decent retirement, not a luxury bolted on at the end.
The two caveats almost everyone misses
1. These are costs, not income
Pensions UK states this plainly: the standards show the cost of each living standard, not the income you need. To spend £32,700 you must receive more than £32,700, because most retirement income above the personal allowance is taxable. Anyone quoting these figures as "the income you need" is understating the target, sometimes by several thousand pounds.
2. They assume you own your home outright
Rent and mortgage payments are excluded from every figure in the table. If you expect to still be paying a mortgage at retirement, or renting, that cost sits entirely on top. For a lot of people this is the single biggest adjustment they need to make to the published numbers.
How far does the State Pension get you?
The full new State Pension is £241.30 a week, which is about £12,548 a year. Set against the standards, that covers:
- Roughly nine tenths of the single Minimum standard
- A little over a third of the single Moderate standard
- About a quarter of the single Comfortable standard
Two full State Pensions between a couple, around £25,100, cover most of the couple's Minimum standard. Everything above that has to come from private pensions, other savings, or continuing to work. That gap is the entire job of retirement planning.
How many people actually get there?
This is where the picture gets uncomfortable, and where a genuinely government source is available.
The DWP publishes Analysis of Future Pension Incomes, an Official Statistics release. The most recent edition, published on 21 July 2025, projects the working population against these exact standards:
- 73% are projected to have a pension income below the Moderate standard
- 91% are projected to fall below the Comfortable standard
- 43% of working-age people, around 14.6 million, are undersaving measured against their own target replacement rates before housing costs
And the finding that surprises people most:
Higher earners are the most likely to be undersaving
The DWP found that around 1 in 8 (13%) of those earning under £15,900 are undersaving, compared with 1 in 2 (48%) of those earning over £67,000.
The reason is straightforward. The State Pension is a flat amount, so it replaces a large share of a low earner's income and a small share of a high earner's. If you are used to living on £80,000, £12,548 of State Pension covers about a sixth of it. Everything else has to come from what you have built yourself, and the gap is far larger than most high earners assume.
What to do with these numbers
Treat the standards as a sense check, not a target. They describe an average household, and you are not one. A useful sequence is:
- Find which standard reflects the life you actually want, then adjust it for your housing costs and anything unusual about your spending.
- Get a State Pension forecast from GOV.UK. It takes minutes and occasionally reveals a shortfall worth thousands.
- Add up every pension you hold, including old workplace pots.
- Work out the gap between what those will sustainably produce and what your chosen standard costs, remembering the tax point above.
The gap is the number that matters. Not the size of the pot, and not the headline figure in the table.
Sources
- Pensions UK and Loughborough University, Retirement Living Standards (updated 3 June 2026)
- Department for Work and Pensions, Analysis of Future Pension Incomes 2025 (Official Statistics, 21 July 2025)
- GOV.UK, The new State Pension: what you'll get
- GOV.UK, Check your State Pension forecast