Golden oldies: Are one in five pensioners millionaires?

Readers have asked us to check a surprising figure in the Sunday Times Style supplement, that one in five over-65s in the UK is classified as a millionaire according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). This claim has been going around since the data was first published in 2019.

The truth is a bit more complex, and depends on what you count as a millionaire. 

Data the ONS collected between 2016 and 2018 shows that one in five households (22%) in Great Britain, where the main householder (the person responsible for household finances) is over 65, have a household wealth of over a million pounds.

The data also shows that one in four people aged over 65 (25%) lived in a household with a total wealth of over a million pounds.  

So a household with two 70-year-olds and a combined wealth of a million pounds would fall into these millionaire categories, but whether you’d class both as millionaires is arguably a matter of opinion, and depends on things such as whether they own the assets jointly or solely. 

As the data is a bit old by now, you might expect more over 65s to live in millionaire households now than did a few years ago, given the proportion of households with wealth over a million pounds has increased over time. 

And while the Sunday Times’s article brings up the statistic in the context of talking about the disposable income of the baby boomers, these figures aren’t about how much money people have in the bank.

The ONS’s definition doesn’t just include disposable financial wealth, but other forms of wealth such as property value and pension pots.