You look up the average net worth for your age, see something like £209,600, and quietly panic.
Here is what nobody tells you: that figure is a whole household, not you, and most of it is locked in bricks and a pension you cannot touch for decades.
We have pulled the real ONS numbers, split them properly, and added the one figure that actually tells you how you are doing.
Key takeaways
- Median household net worth in Great Britain is £293,700. Median individual net worth is £125,000. Most guides quote the first and let you assume it is the second.
- Household wealth peaks at £502,500 for the 65-74 age group, 33 times the 16-24 group.
- The typical 35-44 household holds £209,600 in total wealth but only £5,600 in savings and investments. Roughly 97% of it is not money you can reach.
- Property (40%) and pensions (35%) make up three quarters of UK household wealth.
- The data is older than it looks. It was collected between April 2020 and March 2022, and the ONS suspended the survey’s accreditation in June 2025.
Contents
Average net worth by age in the UK
This is the table everyone quotes.
It comes from the ONS Wealth and Assets Survey, Round 8, covering April 2020 to March 2022.
It measures households, sorted by the age of the household head.
| Age of household head | Median household net worth |
|---|---|
| 16 to 24 | £15,200 |
| 25 to 34 | £109,800 |
| 35 to 44 | £209,600 |
| 45 to 54 | £301,900 |
| 55 to 64 | £496,500 |
| 65 to 74 | £502,500 |
| 75 and above | £373,100 |
Source: ONS, Household total wealth in Great Britain, April 2020 to March 2022
Median household wealth across all ages is £293,700.
The 65-74 group is the peak at £502,500, which the ONS notes is 33 times higher than the 16-24 group.
After that it falls to £373,100 as people start spending their pensions.
That climb is not really about getting better with money. It is about time.
Older households have had more years of mortgage payments converting into equity, more years of pension contributions, and the benefit of decades of house price growth.
Why that table is probably not your net worth
Here is the part that gets skipped. The ONS runs two separate wealth measures, and they are not interchangeable.
- Household wealth counts everyone under one roof as a single unit. If you live with a partner, that table is the pair of you combined. If you are 28 and living with your parents, your household could be in the £500,000 bracket while you personally own a laptop and an overdraft.
- Individual wealth counts one adult. The ONS published this separately, in Distribution of individual total wealth by characteristic, covering April 2018 to March 2020.
Median individual wealth in Great Britain was £125,000.
The mean was £305,000, dragged up by the very wealthy.
Compare that with the £293,700 household median and you can see how easily one gets mistaken for the other.
Individual wealth also peaks earlier.
The ONS found it peaks in the 60-64 band at roughly nine times the level of the early 30s group, then falls away in retirement.
Household wealth peaks a decade later, at 65-74.
Which one applies to you? If you are single, use the individual figures. If you share finances with a partner, the household figures are closer. If you are a young adult living in a family home, neither describes you well, and that is a limitation of the data rather than a judgement on you.
The number nobody shows you: what you can actually touch
Total net worth includes your pension and your house. Neither pays for a boiler.
The ONS also publishes median financial wealth, which is savings and investments minus financial debts. This is the money you could actually reach. We have not seen a single competing guide put it next to the total, so here it is.
| Age of household head | Total net worth | Savings and investments | Share you can reach |
|---|---|---|---|
| 16 to 24 | £15,200 | £100 | 0.7% |
| 25 to 34 | £109,800 | £1,300 | 1.2% |
| 35 to 44 | £209,600 | £5,600 | 2.7% |
| 45 to 54 | £301,900 | £7,200 | 2.4% |
| 55 to 64 | £496,500 | £15,600 | 3.1% |
| 65 to 74 | £502,500 | £32,300 | 6.4% |
| 75 and above | £373,100 | £25,800 | 6.9% |
Source: ONS, Household total wealth in Great Britain, April 2020 to March 2022
A note on how to read that last column: these are two separate medians, so the middle household for total wealth is not necessarily the same household as the middle one for savings. Treat the percentage as a rough sense of scale rather than one household’s exact balance sheet.
Even with that caveat, the pattern is impossible to miss. A 40 year old on paper worth over £200,000 typically has under £6,000 they could actually spend. Median household financial wealth across all ages is just £10,400.
So if you have been comparing your savings account to a net worth headline and feeling behind, you have been comparing the wrong two numbers. Our guide to average savings by age is the fairer benchmark, and how much you should really have saved puts a figure on it.
And if it is the comparison itself that stings rather than the number, Sammie Ellard-King explains why everyone feels richer than you, and why most of them are not.
What your net worth is actually made of
The ONS splits household wealth into four parts:
| Component | Share of total UK household wealth |
|---|---|
| Property (minus the mortgage) | 40% |
| Private pensions | 35% |
| Savings and investments | 14% |
| Physical items (cars, contents, valuables) | 10% |
Source: ONS, Household total wealth in Great Britain, April 2020 to March 2022
Three quarters of the nation’s wealth sits in houses and pensions. That is why the gap between owners and renters is so wide: households owning outright had median wealth of £647,400, those with a mortgage £404,700, and renters £40,800.
It also explains why your net worth can climb without you doing anything clever. If you have a mortgage, part of every payment is forced saving, and our average mortgage payment guide shows what that monthly commitment looks like now. Your pension does the same job quietly in the background, which is why the average pension pot matters more to your number than most people realise.
How to work out your own net worth
The maths is genuinely simple. Everything you own, minus everything you owe.
Assets: your home at a realistic current value, any other property, your pension pots, savings, ISAs, investments, your car, and anything else worth a meaningful amount.
Liabilities: mortgage balance, car finance, personal loans, credit cards, overdraft, and any buy now pay later balances.
Here is a worked example for a fairly typical mid-thirties position:
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Flat | £245,000 |
| Pension pot | £38,000 |
| Savings and ISA | £9,000 |
| Car | £6,500 |
| Total assets | £298,500 |
| Mortgage | £182,000 |
| Credit card | £1,200 |
| Total liabilities | £183,200 |
| Net worth | £115,300 |
A few things worth doing properly. Use the price your home would actually sell for, not the one you would like. Include every pension, including old workplace ones you have forgotten about. And count the debts you would rather not think about, because leaving them out just gives you a number that is no use to anyone.
The point of tracking it is not the number itself, it is the direction. Someone going from minus £4,000 to plus £2,000 in a year is doing better than someone sitting still at £180,000. We walk through building the habit in tracking your net worth.
Keep it in one place. The Gains App lets you set money goals and track your progress against them, so you are watching the direction of travel rather than rebuilding a spreadsheet every few months. Download the Gains App.
Where you live moves the number more than what you earn
The regional spread in the ONS data is stark. Median household wealth in the South East was £489,800, against £179,900 in the North East. That is a gap of nearly £310,000 between two groups of people who might be on identical salaries.
Here is the full picture, taken straight from the ONS dataset rather than the headline figures:
| Region | Median household net worth |
|---|---|
| South East | £489,800 |
| East of England | £400,700 |
| South West | £347,700 |
| Wales | £266,900 |
| East Midlands | £261,000 |
| West Midlands | £260,800 |
| Yorkshire and the Humber | £245,600 |
| London | £244,800 |
| Scotland | £239,500 |
| North West | £222,400 |
| North East | £179,900 |
| Great Britain | £293,700 |
Source: ONS, Household total wealth in Great Britain, April 2020 to March 2022
The surprise in that table is London, sitting eighth of eleven at £244,800, below Wales and barely above Scotland. It has the highest property prices in the country and the lowest rate of property ownership, so a large share of Londoners hold no property wealth at all. Treat the London figure with extra care, though: the ONS warns it is the least reliable number in the set, because telephone interviewing during the pandemic undercounted renters and more than half of London households rent.
The individual-level data tells the same story: £236,000 in the South East against £79,000 in the North East, a gap the ONS says has roughly doubled since 2010-12.
The driver is property, not income. The ONS found property makes up 30% of household wealth in the North East but 51% in London. If you bought a house in the right postcode at the right time, the market did the work.
There is a gender gap in the data too. Controlling for age, education, occupation and other factors, the ONS modelled individual wealth as £101,000 lower for women than for men. Career breaks and part-time work hit pension contributions hardest, and pensions are 35% of the whole picture.
If you want the other end of the scale, we cover the top 1% of UK income separately, including where the wealth thresholds sit.
How old is this data, really?
This is the section other guides leave out, and you deserve to know it.
It is not 2026 data. The household figures were collected between April 2020 and March 2022 and published in January 2025. The individual figures are older still, collected between April 2018 and March 2020.
The ONS suspended the survey’s accreditation. In June 2025 the ONS confirmed accreditation of the Wealth and Assets Survey has been suspended from Round 8 onwards, citing concerns about the quality of estimates at a granular level and falling response rates. It is still the best national wealth data we have, but it is no longer badged as accredited official statistics.
It was collected during lockdown, by phone. Round 8 was gathered entirely by telephone rather than face to face. That produced a sample with too many outright owners and too few renters. The ONS specifically warns that London estimates carry extra uncertainty because more than half of Londoners rent.
The pension method changed. The ONS updated how it values defined benefit pensions, which means Round 8 total wealth figures cannot be compared with older releases.
And the headline hides a fall. Strip pensions out, and median household wealth was £181,700, down 4% in real terms from £189,000 in the previous period. The comforting big number is doing a lot of work.
None of this makes the data useless. It makes it a snapshot of 2020-2022, taken in odd circumstances, and worth treating as a rough map rather than a precise measurement.
How to move your number
Net worth responds to a small number of levers, and most of them are dull.
Take the full employer pension match. If your employer matches up to 5% and you put in 3%, you are turning down money. Pensions are the second biggest block of UK household wealth for a reason.
Clear expensive debt before investing. A credit card at 24% is a guaranteed 24% loss every year. Nothing in an ISA reliably beats that.
Use the ISA allowance if you have spare capacity. £20,000 a year, and growth inside it is not taxed.
Track it quarterly, not daily. Net worth moves slowly. Checking it four times a year shows you a trend without inviting you to panic at a bad month.
Do not chase the median. The tables above are descriptions of the population, not targets. Someone renting in Manchester with £15,000 invested and no debt is in a stronger position than the averages suggest, because the averages are dominated by property most people cannot buy.
If you want to see those levers working on a real balance sheet rather than a table, Sammie Ellard-King went from £24k of debt to a £375k net worth using six of them.
If you are earlier in the process, we have specific guides on building wealth in your 20s and building wealth in your 30s. If you want to see what the very top of the table takes, our guide on how to become a millionaire runs the actual maths. And if you are trying to work out whether your salary supports any of this, start with the average UK salary. You will find the rest of our investing guides useful from there.
