Goldman survey finds share of respondents raising retirement savings falls to 39%

The share of respondents who raised their retirement savings fell to 39% this year from 55% in 2025, and the share who cut back rose to 14% from 8%, according to PLANADVISER's account of the 2026 Goldman Sachs Asset Management Survey. In the report carrying those findings, "The New Economics of Retirement: Making Every Dollar Saved Work Harder," the strain sits in the household budget, where housing, health care, education, caregiving and day-to-day living expenses compete directly with the payroll deferral. Access to a plan, the report concludes, is no longer what limits retirement preparedness among the people it surveyed; the daily cost of living is.

Chris Ceder, the firm's senior retirement strategist, used a media briefing on the survey to argue that telling people to save more has run out of road on its own, and that whatever the industry builds next will be judged on whether a dollar already saved works harder, lasts longer and holds up under pressures the report treats as a given. The title is doing real work there, promising more mileage from money already set aside — a product-and-plan-design claim as much as a behavioral one, and one that moves the burden off the saver's discipline and onto construction.

Respondents' own assessment of their progress deteriorated in every age bracket. The share describing their savings as on track or better slipped to 66% among Generation Z from 75%, to 61% among Millennials from 74%, to 60% among Baby Boomers from 69% and to 49% among Generation X from 58%. Millennials gave up the most ground at thirteen points; the other three groups each fell nine.

The obstacles they named are the ordinary ones: housing costs and day-to-day living expenses tied at 31% of respondents, with debt payments at 27%. Which one bites hardest tracks age. Housing was the single greatest challenge for 37% of Gen Z and 36% of Millennials, close to double the worry the report attributes to Boomers, while everyday costs topped the list for 37% of Gen X and 33% of Boomers. Medical expenses ran through all four groups without dominating any, named as the biggest obstacle by 25% of Millennials, 23% of Gen Z and Boomers, and 20% of Gen X.

That pattern is awkward for the standard plan-engagement pitch. The pressure a Gen Z participant names is one large fixed cost; the pressure a Gen X participant names is the slow accumulation of smaller ones. Those are different conversations — a housing conversation and a cash-flow conversation — and neither one is a page in the enrollment packet.

For plan sponsors the obstacle list is the harder half of the report, because none of it lives inside the plan document. Rent, debt and the price of a week's groceries are household balance-sheet problems, and the features a sponsor controls — the match, the default, the lineup, the fee — govern how money behaves after it lands in the account, not whether there is money to send. On this evidence, a sixteen-point slide in the share of respondents adding to their savings reads more like an affordability reading than an engagement one. That is a hard thing for a committee to hear, since affordability is the one variable a plan document cannot reach.

Two years of comparable readings establish a direction, not a trend; one year's decline could answer a cost squeeze that eases. The breadth is harder to wave off, with all four generations losing ground on the on-track measure, but the coverage does not report the survey's sample size, which makes these figures safer to treat as sentiment than as a record of balances.

One line in the report deserves a narrower reading than it invites. Retirement preparedness, it says, is no longer limited by the ability to access or join a plan. That describes the people surveyed, not the workforce. PWD's reporting on EIG's estimate puts the coverage gap at 76.2 million workers, roughly 61 million employees and 15 million self-employed, and those households arrive with a different problem than the rent-and-debt group: no deferral to raise in the first place.

At the other end of the timeline, the IRIC white paper treated underspending in retirement as a design flaw and sketched a playbook built around paychecks, buckets and menu changes. This survey suggests the accumulation years carry a mirror problem, where the same pressure that keeps a respondent from saving also caps how large the balance ever gets.

What the survey cannot say from two readings is whether 39% is a floor or a waypoint, and the coverage reports no sample size to weigh it against. Plan committees will get their answer next year from the same number, with the household budget still the variable that moved.