One in five or one quarter of pensioners are millionaires.
We can’t find data that shows this. According to the Office for National Statistics, 27% of over 65s in Great Britain live in a household that has a total wealth of £1 million or more, but that doesn’t mean 27% of individual pensioners are personally worth this amount.
We’ve seen a number of posts circulating on Facebook that make claims about the number of pensioners in the UK who are millionaires.
One post claims the figure is a quarter, while others claim one in five pensioners are millionaires.
The posts don’t provide a source for the claim, however we’ve previously seen similar versions of it based on data published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
ONS data shows that in the period from April 2018 to March 2020 (the latest for which data is available), 27% of over 65s in Great Britain—around 3.1 million individuals—lived in a household with a total wealth of £1 million or more.
This figure comes from the most recent Wealth and Assets Survey, which was released by the ONS in January 2022 and compiled data on household wealth, and refers to Great Britain, not the UK as some of the posts state.
The ONS measured a household’s total wealth as “the sum of the four components of wealth”. These are physical wealth (the self-evaluated value of household contents, possessions and valuables owned), pension wealth (the value of pension pots excluding the state pension), financial wealth (the value of financial assets such as bank accounts, savings and stocks and shares) and property wealth (the self-evaluated valuation of property owned).
But it’s important to note that this data covers individuals who live in a household with a cumulative wealth of £1 million or more. It does not mean 27% of over-65s are personally worth that amount.
So, a household of two 75-year-olds with a total wealth of £1 million, for example, would see two individuals living in a household with a total wealth of £1 million, even though the wealth is split between them. Some may consider both to be millionaires, and others may believe that neither are. Other pensioners may live alone in households worth £1 million, and some may have other arrangements, such as living in intergenerational households with other family members.
We couldn’t find data for how many individuals over the age of 65 have an individual worth of over £1 million.
We wrote about a similar claim in 2021, and found that data collected for the previous Wealth and Assets Survey showed that among the households in Great Britain where the main householder (the person responsible for household finances) was over 65, 22% (or about one in five) had a household wealth of £1 million or more.
The ONS told Full Fact they had not provided this analysis for the most recent survey. This data still does not tell us how many individual pensioners are personally worth £1 million or more, but rather how many are responsible for households worth this value.
We often see inaccurate or misleading claims about pensions and the support pensioners receive from the government on social media. Claims like these can affect how people choose to vote. Online claims can spread fast and far, and are difficult to contain and correct.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as missing context because while 27% of over 65s in Great Britain live in households with a total wealth of £1 million or more, we don’t know how many individual pensioners personally have this much wealth.
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