The average retirement income for Americans 65 and older. How do you compare?

You turn 65, your accounts settle into whatever they’re going to be, and the Social Security checks start showing up. The obvious next question is how your number lines up against everyone else’s.

The typical household headed by someone 65 or older brings in $56,680 a year, or $4,723 a month. That’s the median, not the average, and it’s the more honest number to compare yourself against. On your own, without a spouse’s income folded in, the number most people actually see is a lot lower: $33,310 a year for a single person 65 or older.

If either number looks nothing like your bank statement, you’re in good company. Averages flatten out a population that includes retired teachers living on a pension and retired executives living on a seven-figure portfolio, and the second group pulls the number a long way up.

Married couples with two incomes and two Social Security checks are doing the heavy lifting on that household median. A single retiree starts thousands of dollars behind before anything else about their situation gets factored in.

What the typical 65 and older household actually brings in

The median household income for someone 65 or older is $56,680 a year. That’s the number where half of households make more and half make less, and it’s the more honest figure to measure yourself against.

The average, or mean, income for the same group runs to $87,260 a year. That number gets pulled upward by a relatively small slice of high-income retirees, the kind with rental property, a paid-off business, or a large brokerage account. Most people never see anything close to it.

That household figure counts every dollar coming in, not just a Social Security check. It folds in pension payments, withdrawals from a 401(k) or IRA, wages from part-time or full-time work, interest, dividends, and rental income if there is any. Someone still picking up shifts at a part-time job or drawing rent from a second property gets counted the same as someone living purely on a fixed benefit, which is a big part of why the range beneath that median is so wide.

If you’re trying to figure out where you stand, the median is the number that matters. It reflects what the middle of the pack is actually living on, not what’s mathematically possible once a handful of wealthy retirees skew the curve.

Retiring single puts you well behind the household number

That $56,680 figure describes a household, and most older households still include two incomes, two pensions, or two Social Security checks even if only one person is still working. Split that money down to the level of one actual person and the median drops to $33,310 a year for someone 65 or older living on their own money.

The two numbers aren’t measuring the same thing, but the difference tells you something real. A married retiree isn’t just luckier. They’re benefiting from decades of combined earnings and, in most cases, two Social Security records instead of one. A single retiree, especially a single woman who spent a career facing a smaller paycheck and more years out of the workforce raising kids, retires onto a smaller income to match. Divorce and widowhood push more people into that single-income column later in life, often without much warning to plan around it.

If you’re comparing your own number to the household figure and coming up short, you might not actually be behind. You might just be one person instead of two.

Social Security is the floor, not the plan

The average monthly benefit for a retired worker is $2,084.40, the most recent figure available. That’s the number most people picture when they think about Social Security.

The reality for half of retirees is worse than that average suggests. Half of all people 65 and older brought in less than $20,520 for the entire year from Social Security, which works out to about $1,710 a month. Your benefit is calculated from your 35 highest-earning years, so decades of lower wages, part-time work, or time out of the workforce raising kids all show up here as a smaller check. Fewer than 35 working years and a zero gets averaged in for each one that’s missing.

Social Security was built to replace part of a paycheck, not the whole thing. Treating it as your full retirement plan instead of your floor is how people end up short, especially once rent, groceries, or a Medicare premium eat into a check that size.

The 401(k) is supposed to fill the rest, and mostly falls short

The average 401(k) balance for people 65 to 69 is $258,800, the most recent account data available. On paper, that sounds like real money. Turned into monthly income using a standard 4% withdrawal rate, it comes to roughly $863 a month.

Add that to the average Social Security check and you land around $2,950 a month, before taxes, from the two biggest pieces of most people’s retirement income. That’s a livable number in a lot of the country. It’s tight in most cities, and it assumes you actually have a 401(k) balance anywhere near the average.

A meaningful share of retirees don’t. Balances at this age range widely, because they’re skewed by a smaller group of high earners who saved consistently for decades, the same pattern that shows up in every income and wealth figure in this article. The people without much saved usually end up leaning harder on Social Security, part-time work, or family, and once you’re required to start pulling from a traditional 401(k) or IRA in your 70s, that withdrawal happens whether you need the money that year or not.

Income drops again once you pass 75

The typical household income for people 65 to 69 runs close to $69,000 a year. By the time that same household crosses 75, the median falls to under $48,000. Age alone accounts for a real chunk of that drop.

Some of it is simple math: savings get spent down instead of added to, and fewer people in their late 70s and 80s are still picking up part-time work or consulting income. Some of it is demographic. Widowhood is more common at this age, and a household that loses a spouse often loses that spouse’s Social Security check or pension along with them, even as housing and medical costs keep climbing.

Whatever number describes your household today, plan for it to look different a decade from now. Income for older retirees tends to move in one direction, and it isn’t up. Spending doesn’t always fall at the same pace, either. Housing and everyday costs often ease once a mortgage is paid off, but healthcare spending typically climbs right through your 70s and 80s, which narrows whatever cushion that lower income was supposed to leave you.

What to do if your number falls short

Delaying Social Security past your full retirement age adds 8% to your monthly benefit for every year you wait, up to age 70. For someone who would otherwise start at $2,000 a month, that’s the difference between $2,000 now and roughly $2,480 for the rest of their life if they hold off three extra years.

Part-time work in your 60s and early 70s does more than add a paycheck. It gives your existing savings more time to grow before you start pulling from them, and it can push back the year you start drawing down a 401(k) or IRA.

These moves won’t close a large shortfall overnight, and nobody should pretend they will. But small, specific choices, especially around when you claim Social Security, tend to matter more than people expect once you actually run the numbers on your own situation. If you’re 50 or older, catch-up contributions also let you put more into a 401(k) or IRA than younger workers can, on top of whatever your employer matches.

Bottom line

The income figures above don’t show whether people have anything saved at all. About three in 10 households headed by someone 65 or older, 11.6 million households in total, have no retirement account or pension of any kind, based on the most recent survey of household wealth.

That’s the number that actually separates a comfortable retirement from a stressful one. Income tells you what’s coming in each month. Whether you have a cushion behind it tells you what happens the month something goes wrong, whether that’s a roof, a car, or a hospital bill that Medicare doesn’t fully cover.

• Why women retire with significantly less than men (and what you can do to close the gap)
• How much a single woman should have saved at 55 (and how you can close the gap)
• The three numbers that actually tell you if you can retire
• Why couples retiring in 2033 face a $16,900 Social Security cut
• 12 retirement income gaps that blindside new retirees