FOI reference: FOI-2026-3641
You asked
Please provide the latest available recorded information showing:
The number of individuals in the UK with defined contribution pension wealth valued above £1 million.
The number of individuals in the UK with defined contribution pension wealth valued above £500,000.
If available, please break these figures down by age band, sex, region, and pension type.
Please state the source dataset, survey wave, reference period, and methodology used.
If ONS does not hold this information in exactly this form, please provide the closest equivalent recorded information held, including any relevant aggregate statistics, tables, estimates, or datasets.
For the purposes of this request, “defined contribution pension wealth” includes personal pensions, stakeholder pensions, SIPPs, group personal pensions, and occupational defined contribution schemes, where such classifications are available.
We said
Thank you for your Freedom of Information request regarding individuals with defined contribution (DC) pensions wealth exceeding £500,000 and £1,000,000.
We provide estimates of individual private pensions wealth, which are based on data collected on the Wealth and Assets Survey. The latest published data are from Round 8 of the survey, which covers the period April 2020 to March 2022. You can find our published pensions wealth estimates in our Pension wealth: applying updated pension methodology to household total wealth in Great Britain estimates dataset. The following tables may be of interest.
Table 6.3 provides quantile estimates for active occupational DC pension wealth, broken down by sex and age band.
Table 6.4 provides quartile estimates for active personal pensions, broken down by sex and age band; personal pensions include stakeholder and self-invested personal pensions, held on a group or individual basis.
Table 6.8 provides quartile estimates for defined benefit (DB) and DC type pensions scheme by age; here DC type pension wealth comprises active defined contribution occupational pensions, active personal pensions (including stakeholder and self-invested personal pensions), active additional voluntary contributions (AVCs) and preserved rights in defined contribution pensions where funds have been partially accessed.
Table 6.11 provides aggregate and quartile pensions wealth by pensions type.
Table 6.17 provides quartile total private pension wealth estimates by government office region; these estimates will include pensions from DB and DC sources.
Specific estimates of the number of individuals with DC pension wealth above £500,000 and £1,000 000 would need to be produced via our bespoke services route. Such services are subject to legal frameworks, resources and agreement of costs, subject to our charging policy. If you would like to request a bespoke dataset, or have any further questions, please contact the ONS Wealth and Pensions team Wealth.and.assets.survey@ons.gov.uk to discuss your enquiry further. As this information is reasonably accessible via another route, s.21(2)(a) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) applies.
We also provide microdata underlying the Wealth and Assets Survey (WAS), which is available via the UK Data Service under an End User Licence, and access to more detailed WAS microdata is available through the ONS Secure Research Service, subject to approval.
If making comparisons to total private pension and total wealth estimates, please note that there has been a change in methodology for calculating DB pensions wealth. The change in methodology means there is a break in the time series for total private pension and total wealth estimates, where estimates produced using this methodology are not directly comparable with earlier periods. Updated methodology is available for Rounds 7 (April 2018 to March 2020) and 8 (April 2020 to March 2022); detailed in Estimating defined benefit pension wealth in Great Britain (2024). Please note, this does not affect estimates for DC pensions, only DB.