Average net worth in the UK, by age — and how to read the number without spiralling.

The number you came for

If you searched this, there's usually a quiet worry sitting behind it: am I behind? So here's the honest answer first, and the story underneath it after. Across Great Britain, the middle household's net worth climbs steadily with age, then drops back in later retirement. This is the full ladder.

Great Britain · ONS Wealth and Assets Survey, April 2020 to March 2022 — the most recent figures, published in 2025. These are median household totals by the age of the household "head", and they include property equity and pensions, not just cash and investments. Source.

Why "average" is the wrong word — and I used it anyway

I put "average" in the title because that's the word everyone types into Google. It's also the wrong measure, and it's worth thirty seconds on why. Picture ten ordinary people in a room, and then Elon Musk walks in. The average net worth in that room instantly becomes a few billion pounds each. Nobody in the room is a billionaire. One outlier has dragged the average into orbit.

Wealth is full of outliers like that, so the mean tells you almost nothing about a normal life. The number that does is the median — the person standing exactly in the middle when you line everyone up from least to most. Every figure in that table is a median. When a flashier article tells you the average 40-year-old has £600,000, they've usually switched quietly to the mean, and Musk has walked into the room.

Reading the ladder, one life stage at a time

The jump that surprises people is the one from the twenties to the thirties — £15,200 to £109,800. That isn't everyone suddenly getting rich at 30. It's mostly one thing: property. The average first-time buyer in England is around 34, so somewhere in that decade a big share of people stop paying rent, which builds nobody's net worth, and start paying down a mortgage, which builds theirs a little every month. The instant you own even a slice of a home, "property wealth" lands on your side of the ledger.

After that it's compounding doing quiet work. Through the forties and fifties the median pushes past £300,000 and then close to £500,000 — more mortgage paid off, more years of pension contributions stacking up, and, for the people who bought early, decades of house-price growth they happened to be standing under. It peaks at 65 to 74. And then, the part everyone forgets, it falls. A retired household living off its pension is meant to watch its wealth go down. That's not the plan failing. That is the plan: you spend years building the pot precisely so you can run it down later.

I'm 28, sitting in that 25 to 34 band myself. The median there — £109,800 — sounded enormous the first time I read it, until I remembered how little of it, for most people in the band, is money you could actually get at. Which is the bit that reframes the whole table.

Most of "your net worth" is money you can't spend yet

Here's how the typical £293,700 household total splits across the country. Property equity is the biggest slice at roughly 40% — the value of the home after the mortgage. Pensions come next at about 35%: workplace and private pots you can't reach until at least 55 (rising to 57). The genuinely reachable money — cash, ISAs and investments — is only around 14%. And the last tenth is "physical wealth", the ONS's tidy phrase for cars and household stuff.

Read that split again, because it changes how the ladder feels. Three-quarters of the middle household's net worth is locked inside a house they sleep in and a pension they can't open for decades. The part you could actually reach in an emergency — the financial slice — has a median of about £10,400. And roughly one household in five has negative financial wealth: more owed on cards and loans than held in savings. So if your own spendable number looks small next to these totals, that isn't you failing. That's how the totals are built. If the whole idea of net worth still feels slippery, I wrote a plainer walk-through of what net worth actually is that pairs with this one.

The half of the data nobody screenshots

An average by age quietly hides how unevenly this is spread, and it would be dishonest to show you the ladder without the spread. In the same figures, the wealthiest 1% of households held about as much as the entire bottom half of the country combined. Owning your home outright put the median household at £647,400; renting put it at £40,800 — a fifteen-fold gap, almost entirely because renters build no property wealth. And geography moves it hugely: the median in the South East (£489,800) was more than double the North East (£179,900).

None of that is here to flatten your mood. It's here so that "the average person my age has X" arrives with the asterisk it deserves. There is no single normal. There's a median, an enormous spread around it, and a set of circumstances — did you inherit, did you buy before the house-price runs, do you rent in an expensive city — that push people up and down the ladder for reasons that have nothing to do with how careful they are with money.

Where these numbers come from (and why to hold them loosely)

I want to be straight about the source, because plenty of "net worth by age" pieces quote it like scripture. These are the ONS Wealth and Assets Survey figures for April 2020 to March 2022 — the most recent published, and carrying real caveats. They were collected during the pandemic, by phone rather than face to face, which the ONS itself says adds uncertainty. The survey's official accreditation was actually suspended from this round while they work on quality, and the next update isn't due until 2026. It's the best national picture we have and it's genuinely useful for orientation — but treat it as a rough map, not a precise reading of where you "should" be.

So, are you behind?

Wrong question — and I say that as someone who used to ask it constantly. The table can tell you where the middle of the country sits at your age. It can tell you nothing about yours: what you earn, what you owe, whether you started late with real momentum or early and drifting, whether you rent by choice in a pricey city or own outright in a cheap one. Comparing your chapter three to someone else's chapter nine has never once made anyone richer.

The number that actually moves your life isn't the national median. It's your own net worth — everything you own minus everything you owe — written down, and then watched. Work it out once, and the useful comparison stops being "me versus the average 35-year-old" and becomes "me this month versus me last month". That second comparison is the only one you control, and it's the one that compounds. It's the whole reason I built WealthR: not to rank you against strangers, but to turn your own number into something you can actually watch move.

If you'd rather map a finish line than a snapshot, the FIRE number calculator and the Coast FIRE calculator are both free and take a couple of minutes. They're about where you're headed — which counts for a great deal more than which rung of a national table you happen to be standing on today.

Frequently asked

This is general information about published statistics, not financial advice or a personal recommendation. WealthR is a planning and tracking tool and is not authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority. Figures are the ONS Wealth and Assets Survey (April 2020 to March 2022) and carry the data caveats described above. For advice about your own situation, speak to a qualified, FCA-authorised adviser.