What the Fed’s Household Survey Misses About Retirement — and How to Fix It

Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared on Boldin.

The Federal Reserve’s latest Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking found that 73% of U.S. adults say they’re doing okay financially or living comfortably. That sounds like good news until you notice that only 35% of non-retirees think their retirement savings are on track. The tension between those two numbers says a lot about how people experience money.

Feeling financially stable and being financially prepared are two different conditions. The Fed’s survey happens to measure both at the same time.

Most Americans feel stable in the present. Preparing for retirement is a different calculation, one that tends to sit at the edge of the to-do list: not urgent enough to force action, but hard to ignore.

If the second number resonates, you’re in good company.

What the Fed’s Financial Well-Being Survey Measures

The Federal Reserve’s Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED) covers a wide range of financial conditions (savings, employment, housing, retirement), but it measures self-reported sentiment, not whether any of it would hold under strain.

Respondents mostly felt financially well when the survey was fielded last October. The labor market had held up, spending and income were close to even for most households, and the majority of adults had paid all their bills the month before.

That snapshot has already aged. Since the survey closed, inflation has reaccelerated sharply, driven in part by an energy price spike tied to the war in Iran. The CPI rose 3.3% year-over-year in March 2026, then accelerated to 3.8% in April, the highest annual rate since May 2023, with energy costs up nearly 18% over the prior year. The pressures that felt manageable in October are likely weighing more heavily now.

A self-assessment of how things feel today reflects the moment, not what a more difficult one would reveal. A job disruption, a large medical bill, or a bad stretch of market returns early in retirement doesn’t show up in a snapshot.

This is why the retirement-readiness number is the more honest signal. You can feel financially well today and still be significantly underprepared for a retirement that’s 10 or 20 years out. Those are different things, after all.

The good news is that the distance between those two numbers is primarily a data problem.

Most people who’ve closed that gap didn’t do it by saving more in a given year. They did it by mapping what they actually have against what they’ll actually need, and finding the outlook more workable than their worry suggested.

Why Financial Well-Being Isn’t the Same as Being Ready to Retire

Financial well-being reflects how things are going right now. Retirement readiness is about whether your finances are sustainable across 20 or 30 years, tested against healthcare costs, Social Security timing, and the sequences of returns you’d rather not plan around.

The gap has widened over time, and it masks a wide income divide. The share of non-retirees who feel on track has slipped from 40% in 2021 to 35% today, where it’s held for the past two years. Among non-retirees with household income under $25,000, only 7% say their retirement savings are on track. Among those earning $100,000 or more, 59% do.

Those numbers track income, but they also track whether someone has built the forward picture, and that part isn’t fixed by income alone.

Two households with the same account balances can be in very different situations depending on whether one of them has checked the numbers against a challenging scenario.

Retirement readiness provides a model of how your income, expenses, healthcare costs, and Social Security timing fit together across two or three decades, including conditions you can’t anticipate now. A lot of people haven’t built that. The 35% figure says so.

If you haven’t built it yet, that’s a solvable problem. A useful first step is seeing where you stand relative to households at your age and income level. Retirement savings by age gives you that benchmark before you run anything more detailed.

What a Softening Job Market Means in Your 50s

A job disruption in your 50s carries costs that don’t apply the same way earlier in your career, and they tend to compound. That’s why a labor market that’s only modestly softer matters more at this stage than it would a decade earlier — and why people who’ve thought through that scenario tend to handle it differently than those who haven’t.

The 2025 SHED captured this shift. The share of adults who said finding or keeping a job is at least a minor concern rose to 42%, up from 37% the year before. Layoffs ticked up to 7% of all adults. The market’s still in reasonable shape, but it’s weaker than it was.

That circumstance hits differently depending on where you are in your career.

For a 35-year-old, a layoff is a real setback, but people that age can recover from it. For someone in their mid-50s, the math changes.

An unplanned exit from work at 57 or 58 compresses the savings window, pulls forward difficult Social Security decisions, and creates a health coverage gap before Medicare at 65 that can be expensive to bridge. Those are real costs, and each one is specific enough to assess in advance.

The SHED also found that 46% of current retirees cited at least one of the following as a factor in when they stopped working:

Health problems or disability: 28%
Caring for a family member: 17%
Lack of available work: 11%

A separate Society of Actuaries survey published this month found that 59% of retirees left the workforce earlier than they expected. Health was the leading cause, but job loss affected roughly 1 in 5 early retirees across all income levels.

The retirement that arrives on schedule tends to do so because someone planned for the possibility that it wouldn’t.

If your company has gone through changes lately, or job security feels less certain than it used to, it helps to test that as a concrete scenario. For example: a retirement that starts at 58 instead of 62, with healthcare premiums somewhere between $15,000 and $20,000 a year before Medicare, and a Social Security benefit that’s reduced because you claimed before your full retirement age.

People who’ve done that analysis almost always come away with more clarity than they expected. Running that scenario now, before any of those variables happen, is what turns a risk into a decision.

Unexpected Expenses Hit More Households Than Most Plans Account For

Some 59% of adults had at least one major unexpected expense in the prior 12 months. The most common were:

A major vehicle repair or replacement: 30% of adults
A major home or appliance repair: 22%
Unexpected major medical expenses: 21%

The median cost for each of the three categories ran between $1,000 and $2,000. At the same time, only 63% of adults said they’d cover a hypothetical $400 emergency using cash or savings. That share has been flat for three years, down from 68% in 2021.

Most of us have handled an unexpected bill and moved on. The question isn’t whether you can absorb one. Most households do. It’s whether your plan accounts for one arriving when your other options are already narrowed.

The more useful frame is whether you could handle one of those expenses in the first few years of retirement, or the same year a job situation changes, without putting your savings at risk.

An uncomfortable answer you’ve thought through is easier to act on than an open question you keep deferring.

What Real Financial Well-Being Requires

The people who feel genuinely settled about retirement usually can’t point to a single thing that made it click. More often it came from answering a handful of specific questions about their own situation. Real financial well-being comes from four things working together:

Liquid reserves: that can absorb a significant unexpected expense without having to pull from retirement accounts before you’re ready
Income resilience: meaning your financial footing doesn’t depend entirely on one job, one account, or one return assumption
Scenario modeling: where you’ve checked your numbers against an earlier-than-expected retirement, higher healthcare costs, or a rough stretch in the market
A review habit: that keeps the plan current as your life changes

When those pieces are in place, retirement stops feeling like unfinished business. Having all four in place before your circumstances change is the actual challenge, and at least one area to strengthen usually surfaces when someone looks closely.

If you find you’re strong on income resilience but thin on liquid reserves, that’s a common pattern. The savings data bears it out: 55% of Fed respondents had set aside three months of expenses in a dedicated fund, down from 59% in 2021, and 30% said they couldn’t cover three months by any means. A specific number gives you something to act on.

What the Fed’s Financial Well-Being Survey Can Tell You About Your Plan

The best way to use this report is as a set of questions for your own situation, not a summary of what’s happening to other people.

Is your sense of financial stability grounded in something you’ve tested, or just in how things happen to be going right now? How much liquidity do you have relative to what you’d need if something went wrong?

The Boldin Planner is built for that kind of work. You can adjust income, expenses, retirement timing, healthcare assumptions, and Social Security claiming age to see how your plan holds under different conditions, including the ones you’d rather not think about yet.

For more on building reliable income throughout retirement, retirement income strategies and how to make your savings last are good places to start.

A majority of Americans are managing fine right now. The harder exercise is knowing whether that’s still true under pressure. Most people find the numbers more useful than the worry they replaced.