Goldman retirement survey ties second jobs to a drop in workers raising 401(k) savings

More than 60% of the 5,000-plus workers in Goldman Sachs Asset Management's 2026 retirement survey have taken an outside job to increase their disposable income, and the study reads that side job as a measure of household strain. The report, "The New Economics of Retirement, Making Every Dollar Saved Work Harder," describes workers postponing major financial goals to cope with the cost of living, and GSAM, which reported $2.65 trillion in regulatory assets under management as of Sept. 26, per RCD's records, found that nearly a third of full-time workers say their current job just barely covers their expenses; among Gen X that figure approaches half.

That strain shows up next in contributions: 39% of respondents said they had raised their retirement savings, down 16% from a year earlier, while the share who had reduced them rose to 14% from 8%. Positive responses to whether savings were on track fell by nearly 10% across the board, and on-track readings declined in all four generations. The movement is easy to miss in the numbers a plan committee normally watches. A participant who trims a deferral still counts as a participant, still appears in the recordkeeper's participation statistics, and still reads as a saver on a dashboard built to track enrollment.

Two decades of plan design have been a project in automating behavior: enroll people by default, escalate them on a schedule, match the first slice of pay, and let the balance compound. Every one of those mechanisms assumes a paycheck with room in it, and the Gen X result is the sharpest test of that assumption because those workers sit closest to retirement and have the least time left for a restored contribution to matter. For a large share of the people GSAM surveyed, the assumption does not hold.

Fifty-four percent of respondents said their money concerns make it difficult to focus on work, and 32% said they had missed work because of financial challenges—figures sponsors tend to route to the financial-wellness budget instead of the retirement plan's. That division is easy to defend and, on this evidence, incomplete, because the same squeeze on a household budget that produces an unplanned absence is the one that caps a deferral.

Households earning less than $100,000 a year reported the most serious financial problems, but higher-income families described many of the same difficulties, particularly the work of prioritizing retirement saving against everything else. GSAM's Greg Wilson, the firm's head of retirement and co-head of Americas third-party wealth, framed the break with the old script this way: "For generations, the retirement security formula was straightforward: work consistently, save diligently, and security would follow." The update his report offers is that consistency and diligence now have competition from the day-to-day cost of living, and that the competition is not confined to entry-level pay.

The sample size—more than 5,000 respondents, cut by income and generation—gives a plan committee a reference point to hold its own participant data against. The practical question is which measurements a sponsor could add, on emergency savings or on deferral changes by income band, that would surface a stretched household budget before it becomes a stopped deferral.

If the sharpest strain sits with lower- and middle-income households, that is where the next round of federal policy points: the 2027 Saver's Match and the new Trump Accounts were written for workers who largely lack a retirement account, and the constraint has turned out to be employer and payroll verification rather than eligibility. A survey whose target population is already taking second jobs to cover the month is a reminder that a subsidy on the first dollars of deferral presumes there are first dollars.

Menus are moving toward private assets and retirement income, and in September Constitution Capital's Horizon CIT opened with more than $50 million in Principal plans and near-term commitments above $1 billion, the clearest test yet of private equity built for the daily-priced 401(k). Product filers are adding those options while the DOL's benchmark safe harbor remains stalled, and the expansion depends on contribution flows. If the share of workers raising their savings was down 16% year over year, the private-asset expansion will be drawing on balances already in the system.

Wilson's report stops short of a forecast, and a survey cannot tell a sponsor which participant is deferring less because a bill swallowed the difference. The movement runs in one direction across income bands and generations at once. The next reading arrives with the Saver's Match live for the 2027 tax year, and it will indicate whether the past year was a stretch of price pressure or a durable change in what workers can commit to a plan.