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On the one measure built to be comparable across borders, Swedish households saved 16.3% of their net disposable income in 2024. French households saved 12.8%, German 11.2%, American 5.7%, Australian 6.1%, Canadian 5.1% and British 4.7%. That is the OECD's net household saving rate, and it is the closest thing to a fair international league table that exists.
It is also not a measure of what you save. A national saving rate is what is left when an entire sector's spending is subtracted from that sector's income, expressed as a share of the income. It includes money that never touches your account, it is dominated by households that look nothing like the median one, and it can move because retirees drew down their savings rather than because anyone changed a standing order. This report assembles the published figures, then spends most of its length on the distance between them and your budget, because that distance is where nearly every article on the subject goes wrong.
Method, and the four things these numbers cannot do
Sources. One cross-country table: the OECD's National Accounts at a Glance, measure B8NS1M, 2024 calendar year, extracted from the OECD SDMX API in August 2026. Five national headline releases: the Bureau of Economic Analysis for the US (June 2026, published 30 July 2026), the Office for National Statistics for the UK (Q1 2026), Statistics Canada (Q1 2026), the Australian Bureau of Statistics (March quarter 2026) and Eurostat for the euro area (Q1 2026). Household-level evidence comes from the OECD/INFE 2023 adult financial literacy survey, the Federal Reserve's 2025 SHED, the FCA's Financial Lives 2024 survey, the ONS Opinions and Lifestyle Survey and the US Consumer Expenditure Survey.
Every figure below is taken directly from those publications. Where we have done arithmetic of our own, it is shown and labelled.
One survey source is harmonised across borders and the rest are not. The OECD/INFE study asks the same question in every country, so its rows can be compared with one another. The FCA, Fed, ONS and BLS surveys were each designed for a single country, with different questions, wordings and populations, so we quote them one at a time and flag it wherever two of them appear in the same paragraph.
Four things this data cannot do.
- It cannot rank countries using national headlines. The 2.7%, 8.9%, 14.3%, 6.2% and 3.5% published by the five agencies use different definitions and cover different periods. Lining them up as a table would be the single most common error in this genre.
- It cannot mix the OECD measure with a national one. The OECD figure is net saving (after depreciation) as a share of net disposable income. The ONS, for example, publishes a gross saving ratio. The UK's 4.7% and 8.9% are both correct and describe the same country.
- It cannot describe a typical household. Every one of these releases is a national accounts aggregate rather than a survey of what individual households put aside. The UK ratio, for one, includes employer pension contributions and is weighted toward higher-income households, so it is not a benchmark an individual should measure themselves against.
- It cannot fill its own gaps. New Zealand has no 2024 observation in the OECD table (its 2023 value was −1.3%). Norway and Switzerland are absent from the measure entirely. We have not substituted anything for them.
The only like-for-like table: OECD net saving rates, 2024
Net household saving as a share of net disposable income, 2024
The OECD's single consistent definition, applied to every country in the table
Source: OECD, National Accounts at a Glance (measure B8NS1M, households and NPISH), 2024 calendar year, extracted August 2026
Two things are worth saying about this chart and nothing more. The spread is wide, from 16.3% to below zero, which means national saving rates are not a rounding error around some universal human tendency. And the English-speaking economies cluster near the bottom of the range while the largest continental European economies cluster near the top. We are not going to explain why. Doing so honestly would need data on pension system design, homeownership rates, demographics and credit availability that this report does not have.
The latest headline from each national agency
Most readers who search for their country's saving rate will land on the national statistics agency, not the OECD. Those are the numbers in circulation, and they are all more recent than the OECD's 2024 vintage.
What each agency published most recently
Five different definitions, five different reference periods. Read down the column, not across.
Most recent published household saving rate
- EAEuro area14.3%gross saving rate, Q1 2026Unchanged from Q4 2025Eurostat, Euro indicators
- UKUnited Kingdom8.9%household saving ratio, Q1 2026Down 0.7 percentage points on the quarterOffice for National Statistics, Quarterly sector accounts
- AUAustralia6.2%household saving to income ratio, March quarter 2026Down from 7.0% the quarter beforeAustralian Bureau of Statistics, National Income, Expenditure and Product
- CACanada3.5%household saving rate, Q1 2026Lowest since Q1 2024Statistics Canada, The Daily
- USUnited States2.7%personal saving rate, June 2026$646.1bn saved, at an annual rateUS Bureau of Economic Analysis, Personal Income and Outlays
The mechanics behind the recent moves are the clearest explanation of what the rate is. Statistics Canada attributes its fall to disposable income rising 0.6% while nominal consumption rose 0.9%. The ABS says the same thing about Australia: gross disposable income up 0.4%, nominal household consumption up 1.1%. Nobody decided to save less. Spending simply grew faster than income, and the residual shrank.
Why one country has two official saving rates
This is the point at which most coverage falls apart, so here it is directly. For the same country you can find two official saving rates that differ by a factor of two or more, and both are right.
The same economy, two published saving rates
OECD net measure (2024 calendar year) against the national agency's own latest headline
Source: OECD, National Accounts at a Glance (measure B8NS1M), 2024 calendar year; Eurostat, Euro area gross saving rate, Q1 2026; Office for National Statistics, UK household saving ratio, Q1 2026; Australian Bureau of Statistics, Household saving to income ratio, March quarter 2026; Statistics Canada, Household saving rate, Q1 2026; US Bureau of Economic Analysis, Personal saving rate, June 2026
Look at Australia. The OECD's 2024 net figure of 6.1% and the ABS's March-quarter 2026 figure of 6.2% are almost identical. That closeness is a coincidence of two different measures over two different periods landing in the same place, and it is a useful warning: agreement between two numbers is not evidence that they measure the same thing.
What the saving rate actually counts
Strip away the labels and the calculation is one line: saving = disposable income − consumption, and the saving rate is that residual divided by income. Five consequences follow, and each one puts distance between the national figure and your own.
It is a sector, not a set of families. The OECD measures saving for "households and NPISH" — non-profit institutions serving households, which means charities, trade unions, churches and clubs are inside the denominator alongside you.
It is an aggregate, so it is dominated by large balances. The UK saving ratio is weighted toward higher-income households, as any sector rate must be: it is a weighted average by pounds, not a count of people. One household saving £40,000 offsets forty households saving nothing.
It counts money you never handle. The UK ratio includes employer pension contributions. If your employer pays into your pension, that lands in the national saving rate whether or not you know the amount.
Net and gross are different questions. The OECD's measure is net of depreciation, measured against net disposable income. The ONS and Eurostat headline ratios are gross. That distinction is one reason the same country shows up as 4.7% and as 8.9%; the other is that the two figures cover different periods, and the published releases do not let you separate the two effects.
It is a residual, so it absorbs every error. Anything that raises measured income or lowers measured spending raises the rate, including revisions. The ONS revises its series every quarter.
The "retirement" line in a real household budget makes the same point from the other direction. In the US Consumer Expenditure Survey, the average consumer unit — the BLS's spending-survey unit, which is close to but not the same as a household — spent $9,797 a year on personal insurance and pensions in 2024, 12.5% of total spending.
What sits inside the US 'personal insurance and pensions' line
Average annual spending per consumer unit, 2024
Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Expenditure Surveys (Table A, USDL-25-1586), 2024 calendar year
The discretionary part of that line, contributions to retirement plans, is $1,991 a year. The compulsory part is more than three times larger. For scale, the same survey puts housing at 33.4% of what the average consumer unit spends, so the whole insurance-and-pensions line is a little over a third of what goes on shelter. Whatever a national saving rate is measuring, the portion of it a household chooses week to week is a fraction of the total.
Why it is not the share of your payslip
Here is the arithmetic that makes the gap concrete, using the UK because it has both an aggregate figure and good household-level survey data.
The ONS puts the household saving ratio at 8.9% for Q1 2026. Separately, the ONS Opinions and Lifestyle Survey found that in May 2026, 35% of adults in Great Britain expected to be unable to save any money at all over the following 12 months. The Financial Conduct Authority found that in May 2024, 10% of UK adults had no cash savings at all and a further 21% had less than £1,000.
If 35% of the population saves nothing and the sector still records 8.9%, the remaining 65% must be saving 8.9 ÷ 0.65 = 13.7% on average. That crude calculation is ours, and it overstates the answer, for a reason worth naming: the arithmetic assumes non-savers hold 35% of household income. They do not. Adults who cannot save are lower-income on average, so they account for less than 35% of income, which means savers account for more than 65% of it and their true average rate is below 13.7%. The direction is what matters. The aggregate is generated by a minority, and the majority's experience is nowhere near it.
Three further caveats on that comparison, because they are the difference between a citable calculation and a sloppy one. The ONS survey covers Great Britain, the saving ratio covers the UK. The 35% is a forward-looking expectation, not a record of behaviour. And a share of adults is not a share of households.
The size of the pot matters as much as the percentage.
Gross disposable income per person, 2024
US dollars, converted at purchasing power parity — the cash income measure
Source: OECD, National Accounts at a Glance (measure B6GS1M_POP), 2024 calendar year, extracted August 2026
What household-level surveys say instead
If the question is how many people are actually putting money aside, a survey of individuals answers it directly. The OECD/INFE's 2023 international survey of adult financial literacy asked adults in 39 countries and economies whether they had actively saved in the past year. Just over two-thirds, 68.3%, said they had — though the range is enormous, from 98% in Korea to 17% in Paraguay.
Ordering by national accounts saving rate produces the most interesting chart in this report. It shows the European countries that appear in both datasets, so its rows are not a sample of the 39 and their average is not the 68.3%.
Share of adults who actively saved in the past year
Rows ordered by each country's OECD net household saving rate, highest first
Source: OECD/INFE 2023 International Survey of Adult Financial Literacy, Annex D Table 2.13, 2022-23 data collection, adults aged 18-79; OECD, National Accounts at a Glance (measure B8NS1M), Net saving rates shown in the row notes, 2024
The extremes agree. Of the countries shown, Sweden is top on both and Greece bottom on both. In between there is no visible relationship. France has the second-highest sector saving rate on this list and the third-lowest share of adults actively saving. Poland is the mirror image: 84.9% of adults saved something, but the sector rate is 6.1%. Italy, at 3.3%, has a higher share of active savers than Spain, at 9.2%.
That is not a contradiction. It is the difference between how many people save and how much of the nation's income ends up saved. A country where almost everyone puts away a small amount and a country where a few people put away a great deal can produce the same headline rate. Any article that treats a national saving rate as a measure of national thrift is conflating the two.
The other thing surveys capture that the aggregate cannot is whether saving is enough to matter. The Federal Reserve has asked American adults the same question about a hypothetical $400 expense every year since 2013.
US adults who could cover a $400 emergency with cash or its equivalent
Cash, savings, or a credit card paid off at the next statement
- Could cover $400 with cash or equivalent
Show the data
| Survey year | Could cover $400 with cash or equivalent |
|---|---|
| 2013 | 50% |
| 2014 | 53% |
| 2015 | 54% |
| 2016 | 56% |
| 2017 | 59% |
| 2018 | 61% |
| 2019 | 63% |
| 2020 | 64% |
| 2021 | 68% |
| 2022 | 63% |
| 2023 | 63% |
| 2024 | 63% |
| 2025 | 63% |
Source: Federal Reserve Board, Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED), 2025 report, published 13 May 2026; survey fielded 17-28 October 2025. Back years read from the Fed's SHED data visualisation table
What this means for your budget
The practical conclusion is short: stop benchmarking yourself against the national number, in either direction.
If your rate looks low next to the headline, the comparison is broken, not you. The UK's 8.9% includes employer pension contributions and is weighted toward high-income households. Work out your own number on your own terms instead. Money kept divided by money received, with take-home pay as the denominator, and if employer pension money is in the numerator then add it to the denominator too. There is a full walkthrough of that calculation, and what different rates buy you, in our piece on running a high savings rate.
Pick a target from your own goals, not from a country average. A 20% target is the standard starting point in the 50/30/20 rule, and it is a rule of thumb rather than a finding. If you have a specific goal and a date, the savings goal calculator will convert it into a monthly figure that is more useful than any percentage.
Fix the buffer before you chase the rate. The FCA found in May 2024 that 42% of UK adults had a limited savings buffer — they could not cover three months of living expenses if they lost their main household income. The Fed, in its 2025 SHED, found 30% of US adults could not cover three months of expenses by any means, including borrowing and selling things, and 12% could not cover a $400 bill by any means — thresholds that produce very different headline numbers from the same worry. Do not read 42% against 30% as the UK being in worse shape: the FCA question is about savings alone, the Fed's is a stricter test that counts borrowing too, so the two are measuring different things and the gap between them is mostly definitional. Taken separately, each is the number that decides whether a bad month becomes debt. Size yours with the emergency fund calculator, and if you want the reasoning behind three to six months, we set it out in how much emergency fund you need and the longer emergency fund guide.
Automate it rather than measuring it. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's analysis of savings app data found that guaranteed rules, such as moving money every payday, were associated with a 1.5 to 3.5 times larger increase in the maximum amount saved within a year than spending-contingent rules like rounding up purchases. It is observational rather than experimental, so it shows association rather than cause, and the popular strategy is not the effective one: rounding-up rules were used by 81% of savings goals, payday rules by 41%. That is the case for paying yourself first.
Then measure it on a schedule you will keep. A saving rate you recalculate once a year is a number you cannot act on. A weekly budget review is enough to keep it honest without turning it into a second job.
The national saving rate is a genuinely useful statistic. It is just answering a question about the whole economy, and you were asking a question about your household.
iBudget tracks what you actually keep each month, across a household rather than a single account. If you want your own saving rate calculated from real transactions rather than estimated from a national average, start a free budget.
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