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New research published this month puts a number on something most people over 40 already feel in their gut: the age they’d like to retire and the age they actually expect to stop working are drifting further apart. According to Standard Life’s Retirement Voice 2026 research, based on 6,000 UK adults, people hope to retire at 62 on average but expect to keep working until almost 68. That’s a 5.3-year gap, the largest this research has recorded, and it’s a reminder that "retirement planning" for most people is still something that happens to them rather than something they actively shape.
Why the gap keeps widening
Part of the explanation is structural. The state pension age is in the process of rising from 66 to 67, pushing back the point at which many people can draw a full state pension even if they’d rather stop sooner. But the research suggests the bigger driver is financial pressure and uncertainty rather than the state pension age alone. Nearly half of respondents, 48%, feel their retirement finances are largely shaped by factors outside their control. Just over a quarter, 26%, say they’re struggling on their current income, and 63% worry they aren’t saving enough. Tellingly, the ideal retirement age in the research hasn’t really moved. What’s moved is people’s confidence that they can actually afford to stop at that age.
The gap also isn’t evenly spread. Outright homeowners face a gap of 2.1 years, compared with 6.8 years for renters, a difference that says as much about housing costs eating into disposable income as it does about pensions specifically. Women face a larger gap than men, 6.1 years against 4.5. Younger generations face the widest gaps of all, 6.8 years for millennials and 5.9 for Gen Z, suggesting this isn’t a problem that resolves itself with time.
A separate but related confidence problem
Research published in August by PensionBee adds another layer to the same picture. Only 16% of UK adults have both worked out how much they’ll need in retirement and feel confident they’re on track to get there. A further 38% say they simply don’t know what their desired retirement will actually cost. Among those who do have a number in mind, the majority underestimate it: 77% put a comfortable single-person retirement below the £45,400 a year benchmark set by Pensions UK, and only around 9% of the working population is currently on track to meet that standard.
Put the two pieces of research together and a consistent story emerges. People aren’t short on hope, 56% in the Standard Life research say they feel hopeful or excited about retirement, they’re short on a clear, costed plan for getting there. That’s a very different problem to solve than simply "people aren’t saving enough," and it points to a different solution.
The part of the research worth paying attention to
Buried in the Standard Life data is the most useful finding of the whole report: people who had done the most financial planning had a retirement expectation gap 4.8 years smaller than those who had done none at all. In other words, the single biggest lever anyone has over this gap isn’t their income, their age, or even their pension pot size on its own, it’s whether they’ve actually sat down and planned properly. And yet 35% of people had done no retirement planning whatsoever, and only 12% said pension saving was currently a priority for them.
Among people who say they left planning too late, the reasons are revealing rather than surprising. The largest group, 32%, say they couldn’t afford to engage with their pension sooner, which points to a genuine financial barrier rather than a lack of interest. But a meaningful share, 16%, simply didn’t know where to start, and 12% found pensions too complicated to get into. Those two groups, worth more than a quarter of everyone who left it too late, aren’t being held back by money. They’re being held back by not having had a straightforward conversation with someone who could explain the options in plain terms.
What a first conversation actually involves
For anyone picturing a first meeting with a financial advisor as daunting, paperwork-heavy, or something that requires having your finances already in order before you walk in, the reality is usually much simpler than that. A first conversation is normally about building a clear picture: what you already have across pensions, savings and property, what kind of retirement you’re actually picturing, and roughly what that would cost each year to sustain it. From there, an adviser can show you where you currently stand against that figure, long before any decisions about products, contributions or investment choices come into it at all.
That initial clarity is often the part people find most useful, simply seeing the gap, or the lack of one, set out in black and white rather than carrying a vague worry around indefinitely. For the 16% in the PensionBee research who say they don’t know where to start, or the 12% who find pensions too complicated to engage with, this first step is specifically designed to remove both of those barriers at once rather than add to them. Nothing has to be decided in that first meeting, and there’s no obligation attached to having it. The point is simply to finally know where things stand, which the research suggests is the single biggest thing most people are currently missing.
Closing the gap starts with one conversation
None of this is a reason for alarm, but it is a reason to stop treating retirement planning as something to get to eventually. The data says plainly that planning works, people who do it close almost five years of the gap between the retirement they want and the one they’re expecting. For anyone who recognises themselves in the "don’t know where to start" or "too complicated" groups in particular, that’s a problem with a genuinely simple fix.
A proper conversation with a financial advisor does exactly what the research suggests is missing for most people: it puts an actual number on what retirement will cost, checks that against what’s currently being saved, and turns a vague sense that "it’ll probably be fine" into a plan with real figures attached. Whether that means adjusting contributions now, understanding what a pension, property and other savings add up to together, or simply finally knowing where you stand, it’s the step that the research shows makes the biggest measurable difference. If any of the numbers above sound familiar, that conversation with a financial advisor is the obvious place to start closing the gap.
