2026 NFP U.S. Retirement Trend Report

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Amber Posthauer Hello.

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Amber Posthauer Thank you for joining us today. We're going to get started here in 60 seconds to allow for everyone to get connected.:

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Jessica Espinoza Yeah.

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Amber Posthauer Welcome everyone to the 2026 NFP US Retirement Trend Report webinar. Thank you all so much for joining us. Please send questions through the Q&A and we'll try to answer as many as we can. Today's presentation is being recorded and we'll be distributing the recording in the coming days. At this time, I will hand it over to Jessica Espinoza.:

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Amber Posthauer Retirement National Practice Leader at NFP and Aon Company. Jessica, the floor is yours.

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Jessica Espinoza Thank you so much, Amber, and thank you everyone for joining. Good afternoon. As mentioned, I'm Jessica Espinoza, and I have the privilege of leading NFP's retirement advisory practice. I've spent more than 20 years with NFP. I'm a CFA charter holder, and I serve on our National Investment Committee.:

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Jessica Espinoza So just to share a bit about NFP, we do view ourselves as more than advisors. We do strive to be really true partners to our clients. And our goal is at the end of the day, the same as many of yours, which is to deliver an outstanding retirement benefit to the employees and participants that we serve.

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Jessica Espinoza So if we can achieve the goal of helping an employee retire on their own terms, then, you know, we've done our job and we're happy with what we've done. So that's why this trend report to us is so valuable. It really gives us a direct view into how today's workforce is feeling about their retirement readiness and whether:

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Jessica Espinoza the support systems we all work so hard to put into place are delivering value and actually meeting the needs of that population. So we are asking employees across the country to tell us how we're doing, and we want to incorporate that feedback into how we evolve these programs moving forward. So the goal is for these insights that we're sharing today to be helpful.

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Jessica Espinoza as you think about retirement programs and your financial wellness resources that you offer your employees. And with that, I will go ahead and turn it over to my colleague and friend, Steve Jans.:

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Jessica Espinoza Steve, you're on mute.

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Steve Jans Sorry about that. Yes, Jess, thank you. And thank you all for joining us. As Jess mentioned, my name is Steve Jans. I am the national practice leader for both wealth management and our financial education program here at NFP. I do have the privilege of leading over 75 financial advisors and financial coaches:

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Steve Jans across the country that help us lead financial education to our clients and all the employees of our clients. I've been in the business for 30 years, working both in financial planning and financial education. And my entire career has been dedicated to group financial education seminars at the corporate level.

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Steve Jans and hosting numerous confidential one-on-one consulting meetings with employees of companies. It's the one-on-one confidential employee meetings that we find are most impactful and have proven that financial literacy is in high demand. We strongly believe that every person:

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Steve Jans deserves a plan. We strongly believe that we lead with education and we leave with action. And we strongly believe that benefit plans, corporate benefit plans, are the true foundation to a strong personal financial plan. And we really help the employees embrace this concept.

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Jessica Espinoza So before we get into the findings, we want to give you a background on the research that was done. We did survey 1000 working adults age 18 and older, and these are folks that identify themselves as the primary financial decision maker in their household.:

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Jessica Espinoza And I'm getting a message that sound is not working. Is that accurate? Can you hear me okay, Steve?

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Steve Jans I can hear you, yes.:

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Jessica Espinoza Okay, okay, got it. Thank you. So, you know, so again, looking at those folks that are the primary financial decision makers for their households, and we intentionally are building a diverse sample to hopefully reflect today's workforce very broadly. So we're looking at multiple age groups, income levels, genders, geographic regions,

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Jessica Espinoza and of course, employers of different sizes. And the goal is to have that really balanced view of how employees across the country are thinking about retirement and financial wellness today.:

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Jessica Espinoza So I'll go ahead and pass it back to you, Steve.

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Steve Jans Yeah, thank you. So we talk about employees falling behind. I was never a big statistics guy when...:

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Steve Jans as I was doing the meetings, but after 30 years of doing this stuff, I've come to believe that the statistics are real. It is true that most people do not feel confident in their retirement planning. As a matter of fact, in our experiences with our advisors, we believe that most people don't feel confident

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Steve Jans in many of their money management decisions or their financial literacy. Most people do believe that they're off track. However, I would challenge this by saying most people haven't really ever investigated whether or not they were on track or not. Oftentimes people are surprised at what they find out,:

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Steve Jans, once they start doing some planning. I know that we show here that 46% of the respondents indicate that they are unable to save or they are deprioritizing retirement planning.

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Steve Jans I do see this as well, and I believe it. We are seeing larger debt obligations than ever before. A $700 car payment is not out of the ordinary today. And to many of us on the call, it's probably a little confusing. That's hard to understand. Common themes that we're seeing contributing to people falling behind:

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Steve Jans lack of financial literacy, higher living costs, debt obligations such as high car payments. And this is another one that I think is real and it's new to many of us. And I call it subscription creeps. Do you remember when your cable bill was $85 a month and all the subscription services told you you were crazy for spending 85 bucks a month because you could just sign up for Netflix for $9.95?

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Steve Jans Well, we all kind of fell for it. Netflix is 995. Spotify is 995. Peacock's 995. They're all 995. And then you wake up six months later and realize that those 995 rates were introductory rates, and you've got 15 of these streaming services, and we're paying way more today than we were for that good old-fashioned cable bill.:

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Steve Jans five years ago. So these are the things that we're starting that we see with employees when we have these one-on-one conversations. And these are the real reasons that people are starting to fall behind.

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Jessica Espinoza So I think the important thing when we think about that gap in knowledge of someone's financial situation is that, you know, our industry has recognized for many years that there is that gap and that people don't understand and they don't have confidence in their ability to retire one day. So in response, there has been a tremendous investment in financial planning tools and wellness resources out there. And:

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Jessica Espinoza We have to give a lot of credit to record keeping partners in the industry. Over the last several years, we've just seen so many improvements in websites and planning tools and calculators and other resources that are available. And they're all designed very well to make retirement planning accessible and engaging. I think the problem is we know usage is still very low and the data in the report

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Jessica Espinoza supports that. So the encouraging side of that is that nearly 70% of employers now offer at least one retirement planning or financial wellness resource. And we know it's probably even bigger than that. It's probably four or five different resources just because of what's included in the package of what they get with their 401k or:

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Jessica Espinoza 403B provider. The bad news is awareness is very low. So awareness is only at 42% of employees saying that they actually know these resources are available to them. And even more concerning to me is that numbers decline. So in our year-over-year data, that number was 55% in our survey last year, and this year's

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Jessica Espinoza down to 42 percent. So awareness is dropping. And so while we're seeing this greater investment and greater access to resources, the understanding that an employee has of what's available and how to use it effectively for themselves is slowing down.:

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Jessica Espinoza right? We're losing ground in that area. So to us, that highlights a clear opportunity that we need to focus less on adding more tools and more about different ways to connect with the employees so they know how to use the tools at their disposal and that they actually take action.

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Steve Jans Mhm.:

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Jessica Espinoza As a result of using these tools.

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Steve Jans So the pressure that's facing, that people are faced with. We talked a little bit about deprioritizing retirement, and we talked a little bit about the inability to save earlier. I do believe there are a few small things that we could be doing to help people get on track faster and help them with their confidence. And some of these are:

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Steve Jans obvious and they're not always that easy, but one is just simply starting earlier. I know it's easier said than done, but if we can help the younger folks get started earlier, the effect of compounding interest has incredible advantages. This is just a quick example. It's quick math and it's very conceptual.

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Steve Jans But just think of this. If A 25 year old can save $500 a month, by the way, that's a cheap car payment in today's day and age. But if they give it 500 bucks a month away and average 7% annual growth from 25 to age 65, so a 40 year time period, they're going to have well over $1,000,000 saved.:

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Steve Jans Take that same example and apply it to a 30 or 5 year old or a 45 year old starting at those ages. A 35 year old is only is saving for 30 years. The 45 year old would be saving for 20 years. I'm getting them all to age 65. And the differences are astounding. The 25 year old has 1.3 million.

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Steve Jans The 35 year old has 610,000 and the 45 year old has $260,000. It just shows you the importance of taking advantage of time and compounding interest. So starting earlier is a significant step in the right direction.:

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Steve Jans Another thought is plan design. Plan design, Jess and the entire retirement plan team spends a lot of time with the clients on plan design and getting creative and helping people, you know, make good decisions with the amount they're saving and how to save it. The introduction of non-qualified plans can be very useful as well.

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Steve Jans Imagine setting up more company contributions earlier in the life of an employee, allowing them the ability to retire at the age of 65 instead of keeping them on payroll, on benefits post 65. These are things that we talk about nonstop. A third tweak:

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Steve Jans and this sounds a little intimidating, but I will say it because we're doing it, is give every employee a plan. Most people are very intimidated about the concept of a financial plan. However, you can see that only 28% of the employees believe that they're on track. Most people don't know what on track means. People don't know how much they're going to need to save.

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Steve Jans to match their current lifestyle. People don't understand what type of income they will have, and people don't understand what their expenses are going to be. So this is just simply more of a financial confidence crisis that can be solved with proper financial education. Access to Retirement Plan is not translating into confidence. We have solved the access problem with plans.:

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Steve Jans But we just haven't solved this, the understanding problem, helping people figure out what to do.

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Steve Jans So if you go to the next slide, it talks a little bit about what is on track. What does that mean? What does on track mean? Throughout my career, it's been clear that most people simply want to retire, get to the point where they don't have to go to work, and maintain the same quality of life. In our opinion, most people want to replace their current income.:

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Steve Jans So that's where we need to start the conversation. We need to start with the concept of replacing income. The focus should not be on how much do you need to save? It should be how much income do you need to replace? This is an easy exercise that can give people a tremendous amount of confidence.

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Steve Jans Once we determine how much income they want in retirement, we can work backwards to get them the actual amount that they need to save.:

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Steve Jans I know I make it sound simple. I've been doing it for 30 years, but it really is a simple exercise and it shouldn't be intimidating. The first thing we need to do is help people identify how much income they need. We can identify that. The second thing we need to do is identify what kind of income sources they're going to have in retirement. As an example, social security or a pension.

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Steve Jans We can identify this. Then we can identify the gap. Once the gap is identified, we can look to see how much they've currently saved and how much they need to be saving in order to fill that gap. These are all items that are identifiable and easily measurable and attainable.:

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Steve Jans This is a process that we need to take people through. I think too many people get concerned that they need millions upon millions of dollars in order to retire. It's a process that we can help people attain. Our current approach in the market is a do-it-yourself model. We provide them a plan. We provide them some

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Steve Jans calculators, we provide websites, we provide articles, but we really send this all home and ask them to figure out how much they want to save. We need to help them. The powerful message for both employers and participants is this. Employees don't need another retirement calculator.:

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Steve Jans they need to know three things. How much income they'll need in retirement, how much income they're currently on track to generate, and what the gap is. Our study has found that employees value human guidance and are substantially more likely to engage when financial guidance feels personable and actionable.

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Steve Jans So as you look to the next slide, it talks about the human element of human guidance. I believe that employees still want human guidance for one big reason. Money decisions are emotional. They're not just financial. I've always believed that every financial decision is either made by either your head or your heart.:

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Steve Jans And emotions play a big part, so it's important to help people understand how money works. I'd say this a little tongue in cheek, but it's fun to buy a new car until you see that you have a monthly payment for a long time. It's fun to buy a new home until you start realizing there's a mortgage payment every month.

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Steve Jans It amazes me how many times I run into people that have $20,000 in credit card bills, and they feel like that's not a big deal. They can get it paid off anytime soon. But they don't understand that at 24% interest, that's 400, or excuse me, $4,800 a year in just simply interest alone. So it's a $400 monthly payment.:

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Steve Jans just to attack the interest on that debt. Interest can work for you and interest can work against you. And it's really important for us to help people understand how that interest works.

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Steve Jans Helping people understand the impact of their financial decisions is usually accomplished through deep conversations with someone that they can trust. And the trust usually leads to helping them with action, helping them with confidence, and helping them understand the ramifications of their decisions.:

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Steve Jans You can see on this graph that only 15% of the employees didn't use retirement planning resources. So to Justin's point, we are providing lots of resources to our employees. And it just shows that there's a tremendous amount of curiosity and demand for resources.

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Steve Jans 84% of the respondents would engage in one-on-one financial guidance conversations. As an employer, I think it's really important to understand that you matter. You have a significant amount of built up trust with your employees. They trust that you provided them with access to financial tools and benefits and platforms.:

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Steve Jans They will also trust you when you put advisors in front of them. Employees are too busy and life is too hectic for them to seek out financial guidance on their own. Providing trusted relationships at the workplace is powerful and proven to help retention, employee satisfaction, and more confident employees.

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Jessica Espinoza And I think the important thing there, Steve, is that with that human connection, it's using all those tools. So those tools are still valuable. It's just connecting the dots between the experience that an employee is having and making them feel they're truly on track by utilizing some of these features and factors that are available to them.:

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Jessica Espinoza through the programs offered today.

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Steve Jans Yes. And this graph is very interesting, too. I was kind of looking forward to seeing what the results were. And I was a little bit surprised, to be honest, but it just kind of talks a little bit about where employees look to for guidance and trust, right? We keep hearing that online access to information and the introduction of AI is going to take over financial advisory conversations.:

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Steve Jans I do believe that social media, online information, and AI will continue to bombard us with information, but when it comes right down to making a financial decision, we're still finding that people lean on human advice for guidance.

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Steve Jans employees engage more when they feel like the advice is personalized. You can see here on the graph, you know, and this doesn't totally surprise me, the first few things here, who do they trust the most? They trust their spouse, they trust their family, and they admit that they trust advisors when they're:

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Steve Jans provided by their employer. So it kind of goes hand in hand. Like employees trust the benefits package because it's been vetted by a committee and they put good benefits in front of people. When they look at financial advice or financial planning as a core benefit to the offering, it's showing that people trust that. I was a little surprised to see this though.

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Steve Jans the least amount of trust is in social media influencers, media, and AI. It'll be interesting to see how these things trend on the trend report as time goes on. So in conclusion for me at this point is the keys to successful engagement is financial guidance needs to be relevant to the audience.:

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Steve Jans know who we're talking to. If we're talking to 55 to 65 year old folks, they're mostly interested in retirement income and social security and Medicare. If we're talking to 20 to 30 year olds, they're interested in cash flow management and debt management and starting to save. So relevancy is important. The financial guidance needs to be personal. And most importantly, the financial guidance needs to be

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Steve Jans actionable. And what I mean by that is if we can help people just with small financial victories that they can achieve, they will become more confident in the decisions they make with their money on a going forward basis.:

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Jessica Espinoza So why does that matter, right? And why do all these trends matter that Steve is discussing beyond wanting the best for employees? Of course, we want that first and foremost. But retirement readiness does have a very real implication for the organizations that we all work for and workforce planning.

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Jessica Espinoza One statistic that stands out here is that 41% of employees are expecting Social Security to be their primary source of retirement income. That's a huge number. And we know never has Social Security meant to be the primary resource. That's not how the program was designed. It was meant to always be a supplemental:

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Jessica Espinoza plan. So many workers today are still not realizing that despite the education and the efforts we put in to make sure that they have to be accountable for their retirement to become a reality. And at the same time, more than 1/3 of employees are reporting that they have little to no retirement savings outside of their workplace.

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Jessica Espinoza place retirement plan. I think that's a critical statistic because that means one, you know, there isn't something else out there to supplement. So when we see the data from record keepers saying people are on or off track, that's a real metric that we all have to pay attention to and evaluate and consider. And on top of that,:

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Jessica Espinoza If you don't have outside investable assets, your access to financial coaching and financial advice is very limited. And so to the extent that you can offer some type of access to financial wellness in the form of one-on-one connection with an advisor,

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Jessica Espinoza that can provide customized advice. That's something that really can be a valued benefit just because it's something you can't even access if you tried outside if you don't have the right kind of assets outside of the retirement plan.:

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Jessica Espinoza I would also say, you know, again, when employees are not financially prepared to retire, they're staying in that workforce longer. We all know the downstream impacts of that. That's going to create challenges for employers, like rising compensation, health care costs going up, and of course, the lost opportunity to develop that next generation of talent.

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Steve Jans Yeah.:

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Jessica Espinoza So we want everyone to be retirement ready beyond what we want for humankind, but because we want it to support the growth of our businesses and our workforce in a strategic way.

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Jessica Espinoza So what can we do to take out some action items from the data that we're finding? I would say first would be to simplify. We're hearing that there's a lot of noise out there, a lot of resources, a lot of tools, and not a lot of knowledge on how to use them and how to create actual confidence and results and retirement readiness as a result. So:

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Jessica Espinoza From that, I would say a clear strategy where you're focused on specific tools that you think will actually make a difference will be more effective than offering endless options or continuing to add new options to a plethora of choices that they already have today.

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Jessica Espinoza The second would be to personalize, and technology and AI can be incredibly helpful here, right? Because there can be a lot of tools that we can use to automate the right allocation, to automate the right resources, like in-plan income solutions and things of that nature that you can consider.:

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Jessica Espinoza But coupling that with the guidance and the human support that makes a participant feel confident in those solutions so that they can actually act on that and really get the support they need to take the next step to further their financial future. And then of course, if we're going to pay

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Jessica Espinoza the strategic approach in place, we want to measure the outcomes. If you're narrowing your focus onto a few tools or a few resources and a more robust communication plan, you need to measure whether that's successful and then adjust and tweak. I will tell you it can take a few years for a program to really take root.:

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Jessica Espinoza And with that comes the evolution from the data of whether it's successful or not. So measuring it, identifying those metrics. Success can mean different things to different organizations, but identifying what metrics you're going to track and then tweaking the program to meet those metrics is really the key to success. And then finally, reinforcing

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Steve Jans It.:

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Jessica Espinoza this message to your staff. If you think about communication, it cannot be a one-time event. There's constant turnover in who you're speaking to to your audience, whether they're open to the messaging or not. So keeping that a proactive outreach and education opportunities and making that engagement something that you focus on on an ongoing basis is really critical.

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Jessica Espinoza So great resources are going to be out of sight and out of mind, especially as constant communication is going to come out on the regular so that reinforcement is not repetitive. It's necessary for success.:

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Jessica Espinoza And then how can NFP help in these efforts? Well, I mentioned earlier, we view our role as an extension of the team, and investment oversight is a part of what we do, but it's not the core focus. We want to be an all-encompassing advisor, and that certainly is true when it comes to financial education,

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Jessica Espinoza and really delivering for the employees. We do have a fairly dedicated financial education team that they work to design and deliver and refine these programs every single day to try to drive that participation and improve retirement readiness. And because we're working with employers of all sizes and across all industries, we can bring ideas and best practices:

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Jessica Espinoza and lessons learned from those successful programs and tailor them to make them a little bit more unique to the population that you're serving. So if you feel like employees are not engaging with the resources available to them or just looking for a new approach, as you can hear from Steve, we are very passionate about this work.

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Jessica Espinoza We like to meet with employees. We like to make a difference in their lives. So we're always happy to roll up our sleeves, collaborate with your team, share ideas that we think can move the needle. And with that, I would open it up to any questions, if we have any in the chat. Amber, I don't know if you've been monitoring that, but let me know if we have any questions that we should address.:

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Amber Posthauer Let's see here. I'm not seeing any questions in the Q&A or the chat at the moment.

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Jessica Espinoza Okay. All right. Perfect. Well, then with that, I would just say thanks everyone for your time. We hope it was helpful information. And again, this is just a preview. There's a lot of good data, a lot of good charts and graphs and responses within the full report, which we will be sending out.:

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Jessica Espinoza an advanced copy of that full report to everyone in a few days. So please be on the lookout for that. And of course, with that follow up material, our contact information will be included and we're happy to follow up with any questions or feedback that you may have for Steve or myself. And I'll turn it back to you, Amber.

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Jessica Espinoza close this out.:

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Amber Posthauer All right, thank you. Thank you, Steve and Jessica, for sharing your valuable time and expertise with us today. That concludes our webinar. Thank you, everyone, for joining us, and have a great day.

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Steve Jans Thank you.:

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Jessica Espinoza Thank you.