Moneywise and Yahoo Finance LLC may earn commission or revenue through links in the content below.
In 2026, the average American believes the “magic number” for a comfortable retirement is $1.46 million, according to Northwestern Mutual (1). Unfortunately, most workers are nowhere close to that lofty target.
In fact, as of 2022, only 4.6% of Americans had retirement assets greater than $1 million, according to a study by the Congressional Research Service (2). Put another way, less than 1 in 20 people in America are in the seven-figure retirement club.
Top Picks
Despite all the headlines and braggarts you see on social media, this is still a rare and exclusive club.
So, if you’re falling short of this target but still determined to break into this golden tier, here are three simple steps you can take to improve your odds of success.
Step 1: Measure your progress
You can’t get to any destination if you don’t know where you are starting from. That’s why the first step to a million-dollar retirement is to find data on retirement savings and compare your progress to your peers.
According to Empower, the typical American has roughly $532,291 in retirement accounts as of early 2026 (3), meaning that the average person is already halfway to a million. However, in order to get a true sense of your financial progress, it’s a good idea to dig deeper into the numbers to find the median — not the average, or mean — retirement savings for someone in your age group.
If you were to look at a set of numbers — such as the retirement savings of the American population — and then sort them into smallest to biggest, the median would be the number in the very middle of that dataset, separating one half from the other. Unlike the mean (or average), the median is less skewed by outliers — billionaires, for instance — so that it arguably gives a clearer picture of a “typical” value in certain sets of numbers.
Looking at retirement savings, the median balance for someone in their 20s is just $42,502, according to the same research from Empower. Older Americans who have potentially had longer careers and more time to save generally have higher balances. So, the median balance for someone in their 50s and 60s is $438,886 and $536,748, respectively.