Stats › Active, passive and flows › Retirement assets
US retirement assets
Most American stock ownership doesn't come from anyone deciding to buy stocks. It comes from a retirement account. Money leaves a pay cheque automatically, lands in a workplace plan, defaults into a fund, and buys equities on a schedule regardless of what the market is doing or what anybody thinks about valuations. Nobody sits down and makes that call each month. The system makes it for them.
This page sizes that system. Where the money sits, how it splits between individual accounts, workplace plans and old fashioned pensions, and why it turns out to be the largest single source of demand for shares in the world. The split I'd point you at first is government pensions against private sector ones, because it's the clearest measure anywhere of how completely the US shifted the investment risk off employers and onto individuals. Public sector workers still largely have a pension. Private sector workers largely have an account and a hope.
There's also a section on the quarterly change, which exists because a falling total in a pool this size almost never means what headlines say it means. The figures come from the Investment Company Institute's quarterly release, dated at the bottom along with one Gallup figure. It's a single main source, which is worth knowing when you're deciding how much weight to give any of it, and the link is there for you to check.
US retirement assets totalled $47.6 trillion at the end of March 2026, about 34% of all household financial assets. IRAs hold $18.2 trillion, the largest single pool, ahead of defined contribution plans at $13.8 trillion, of which 401(k)s are $9.9 trillion. Government defined benefit plans hold $10.0 trillion and private sector defined benefit plans just $3.0 trillion, which is the clearest single measure of how completely the US shifted from pensions to individual accounts.
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