You may retire comfortably without $1 million

retire comfortably – New retirement survey results suggest many Americans can live comfortably in retirement with far less than $1 million saved—though confidence drops when savers face major shocks like costly long-term care.

For years, retirement advice has floated a familiar target: save $1 million, or enough to generate comfort well beyond it. But the numbers coming out of recent surveys tell a more complicated story—one that’s less about hitting a magic figure and more about whether people have enough cushion when life gets expensive.

The typical retiree, for example, reports far less than $1 million in household savings. In a 2025 retirement survey by the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies, the typical retiree has $126,000 in household savings. Other surveys find that only about half of retirees have any retirement savings at all.

And yet, many retirees say they’re doing fine. In an April Gallup poll, 82% of retirees said they have enough money to live in comfort. In the 2025 federal Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking. 83% of Americans over 60 said they were either “living comfortably” or “doing okay” financially. In the Transamerica survey, 76% of retirees said they are confident they can maintain a comfortable lifestyle in retirement.

“‘If what you’re asking is, ‘Are we preparing sufficiently for retirement,’ all of these numbers say that we are,” said Andrew Biggs, a senior fellow at the libertarian American Enterprise Institute.

That view echoes a point Biggs has made before: a lot of Americans. he argues. don’t need seven-figure savings to retire comfortably. A few years ago. he drew attention with a Wall Street Journal column titled “You Don’t Need to Be a Millionaire to Retire. ” arguing that many families are being sold a retirement crisis that doesn’t match the lived experience reflected in surveys.

He also contends that the retirement industry and media can overstate how necessary it is for every household to bank savings in the seven figures.

Anqe Chen, associate director of savings and household finance at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, agreed that $1 million may not fit everyone. “That’s a very high number for some people, and not enough for others. That one number just doesn’t fit everyone.”

Survey results back up that gap between comfort and savings.

In EBRI’s 2026 retirement confidence survey—the EBRI/Greenwald Retirement Confidence Survey—roughly three-quarters of retirees rated their financial wellbeing as good, very good or excellent. Seventy-three percent said they are confident they will have enough money in retirement.

Craig Copeland, director of wealth benefits research at the Employee Benefit Research Institute, said, “Most retirees do seem to be getting by.” He also cautioned that “how we define ‘getting by’ becomes tricky.”

The tension comes into focus when savers are asked directly about whether their nest eggs are truly sufficient.

In the Transamerica survey, only 56% of retirees said they believe they have built a sufficient retirement nest egg. Catherine Collinson, CEO of the Transamerica Center, said the confidence is fragile when the unexpected arrives. “They’re doing okay financially,” Collinson said. “But if they were hit with a major shock. like having to pay for major out-of-pocket long-term care. their savings would be depleted in a hurry.”.

Long-term care plans also show a reliance on informal support. Nearly 50% of retirees in the Transamerica report said they would rely on family and friends to provide long-term care rather than pay for professional caregivers.

Even risk estimates point to uneven ground beneath “getting by.” The Center for Retirement Research maintains a National Retirement Risk Index that estimates how many workers are at risk of not keeping up their standard of living in retirement. In recent years, the index has ranged between about 40% and 50%. It now stands at 39%, meaning roughly 2 in 5 workers may not be doing so well in retirement.

Taken together. the surveys sketch a pattern many retirees recognize: life can look stable from the inside. yet the margin for error can be thin. The same survey evidence also suggests that younger adults face more strain. A Bankrate survey found that only 47% of Americans have enough cash on hand to cover a $1,000 emergency.

Biggs said retirees are more financially stable than younger Americans, pointing to survey responses over age. In the Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking. the share of Americans saying they are doing worse than “okay” financially drops from roughly 32% at ages 35–44 to 12% at ages 75 and up.

“Only a tiny percentage of seniors say they’re really having a hard time, and those percentages are smaller than for working people,” Biggs said.

So if $1 million isn’t the universal answer, how much does someone actually need to retire comfortably? Biggs and other experts say it depends on what people earned during their working lives, since retirement income streams don’t replace everyone’s pay in the same way.

Median household income in the United States is around $84,000, according to federal data. Even saving 10 times that amount still wouldn’t add up to $1 million.

Lower-income households, retirement experts say, generally need less to sustain their standard of living. That difference is closely tied to Social Security, which most Americans rely on as a primary source of retirement income. Social Security benefits are progressive: the lower your income. the more of it you get back in your Social Security checks. That structure affects how much needs to be saved on top of Social Security.

Social Security “replaces” 90% of income up to $1,286 a month. The replacement rate drops to 32% for incomes between $1,286 and $7,749, and to 15% for incomes above $7,749.

In Biggs’s view, the savings advice should move with that reality. “In other words, lower-income households ‘shouldn’t be saving very much for retirement,’ Biggs said, ‘and they’re not saving very much for retirement.’”

The broader message from the survey data is less about whether $1 million is “possible,” and more about what people are actually doing—and what happens if costs spike.

For many retirees. the picture still reads as workable: large majorities say they can live comfortably. and many express confidence about retirement ahead. But the same surveys repeatedly surface a sharper question beneath that confidence: whether savings can absorb shocks like expensive long-term care—especially for households that hold far less than the familiar seven-figure goal.

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