The short answer: in 2024/25 nearly a million pension plans were accessed for the first time, £70.9bn was withdrawn, and drawdown was chosen roughly four times more often than an annuity. Fewer than a third of those people took regulated advice. The full dataset is free, and it is worth ten minutes of your time before you make any decision about your own pension.
Where the data comes from
Every year the Financial Conduct Authority collects and publishes Retirement income market data, covering how pension plans were accessed across the whole regulated market. It is not a survey, an estimate, or an industry press release. It is the actual reported activity of the firms that hold people's pensions.
The figures below are from the 2024/25 edition, covering April 2024 to March 2025.
The headline numbers
| Measure | 2023/24 | 2024/25 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plans accessed for the first time | 885,455 | 961,575 | +8.6% |
| Total value withdrawn | £52,152m | £70,876m | +35.9% |
| Drawdown policies sold | 278,977 | 349,992 | +25.5% |
| Annuities sold | 82,061 | 88,430 | +7.8% |
| Accessed with regulated advice | 30.9% | 30.6% | Down |
| DB to DC transfers | 7,181 | 6,418 | Down |
Four things worth noticing
1. Drawdown has won, decisively. Just under 350,000 drawdown policies were sold against 88,430 annuities, so roughly four people chose to stay invested and draw an income for every one who bought a guaranteed income for life. Drawdown also grew three times faster than annuities did.
2. Annuities are recovering, but the story is often overstated. Sales rose 7.8%, which is real growth, and higher interest rates have made annuity rates far more attractive than they were a decade ago. But drawdown grew 25.5% over the same period. Annuities are not staging a comeback so much as holding a small and slightly growing share.
3. The amount of money coming out is rising much faster than the number of people. Plans accessed rose 8.6%, but the value withdrawn rose 35.9%. People are taking substantially more out per pot than they were a year earlier.
4. Fewer than a third take advice, and the number is falling. 30.6% of first-time access involved regulated advice, down from 30.9%. Close to seven in ten people are making a permanent, high-value decision without professional input.
To be fair about that last point
Not taking advice is not automatically a mistake. Many of those 961,575 plans will be small pots being tidied up, or people with simple circumstances who have read enough to make a sound decision. Advice costs money and is not always worth it. The concern is not the headline percentage, it is what the withdrawal data shows some of those people doing next.
The number that should worry people
The FCA also reports withdrawal rates as a percentage of pot value, and this is the part that rarely makes the news.
Across successive years, a large minority of people taking regular withdrawals have been drawing at 8% or more of their pot value each year. It was 43% of regular withdrawals in 2020/21 and 40% in 2021/22. The 8% or more band has consistently been the most popular rate for pots up to £249,000.
For context, long-run research on sustainable withdrawals generally lands somewhere around 3% to 4% a year for a retirement expected to last 30 years or more. Drawing 8% is not marginally aggressive, it is roughly double.
On a £250,000 pot, 8% is £20,000 a year. That feels manageable in year one. It is the years after that, particularly if markets fall early on, where the arithmetic turns.
Again, some of this is entirely rational. Someone with a £30,000 pot alongside a generous defined benefit pension might sensibly run it down quickly. Someone bridging two years to State Pension age might deliberately draw hard and then stop. The data cannot tell you which withdrawals are considered and which are not. What it does tell you is that a high withdrawal rate is normal, and normal is not the same as safe.
The other half of the picture
The FCA data shows what people are doing now. The DWP publishes the projection of where it leads, in Analysis of Future Pension Incomes, an Official Statistics release dated 21 July 2025:
- 43% of working-age people, around 14.6 million, are undersaving against their own target replacement rates before housing costs
- 73% are projected to have a pension income below the Moderate Retirement Living Standard
- 91% are projected to fall below the Comfortable standard
- Around 13% of those earning under £15,900 are undersaving, against 48% of those earning over £67,000
That final line is the one most people get wrong. Higher earners are nearly four times more likely to be undersaving than the lowest earners, because the State Pension is a flat amount and replaces a much smaller share of a large income. Earning well is not the same as being on track.
What to take from all this
Three things, none of which require you to hire anyone:
- Know your own withdrawal rate. Divide what you plan to take each year by your pot value. If the answer starts with an 8, you should be able to explain why that is deliberate.
- Do not read the crowd as guidance. Drawdown being four times more popular than annuities tells you what is popular, not what suits you. The FCA publishes this data partly because it is concerned about some of the behaviour in it.
- Use the free help first. Pension Wise, part of MoneyHelper, gives free government-backed appointments to anyone over 50 with a defined contribution pension. Seven in ten people access their pension without regulated advice, and free guidance is a much better starting point than nothing.
Sources
- Financial Conduct Authority, Retirement income market data 2024/25
- Financial Conduct Authority, Retirement income market interactive analysis (withdrawal rates by pot size and age)
- Department for Work and Pensions, Analysis of Future Pension Incomes 2025 (Official Statistics, 21 July 2025)
- MoneyHelper, Pension Wise appointments