Resume af teksten:
Storbritanniens opsparingsrate var 8,8 %, men pensionsbidrag har stor betydning for tallet.
Når pensionsbidrag fratrækkes, falder den britiske opsparingsrate til omkring 5 %.
Tysklands opsparingsrate var til sammenligning 17 % efter samme opgørelsesmetode i 2025.
Kun 17 % af briterne mener, at statspensionen vil være tilstrækkelig, mod 34 % i Europa i gennemsnit.
Boliginvesteringer udgør omkring to tredjedele af den britiske bruttopsparing.
Storbritanniens finansielle opsparingsrate var 4,2 % i 2025, mod 6 % i eurozonen.
En stor del af briternes finansielle opsparing går til pensionsfonde, mens husholdninger er nettosælgere af investeringsforeninger og aktier.
Når pensionsindbetalinger ikke medregnes, er britiske husholdninger ofte nettolånere.
Værdien af midler på husholdningernes bankkonti er faldet 8 % i reale termer siden midten af 2021.
Fra ING:
What if I told you the UK had a negative savings ratio? That Brits are consistently spending more than they earn?
That might all sound a bit strange, looking at the UK’s headline savings ratio – which, at 8.8%, is both above pre-Covid levels and well above the depths reached at the start of the 2022 cost of living crisis.
Yet our analysis suggests that is highly misleading. It overstates the ability of British households to absorb the cost of living shock. And more importantly, it suggests UK consumers are significantly more vulnerable to the mounting energy crisis than just about anywhere else in Europe.
It all comes down to pensions. Plans to curtail future increases in the state pension, via changes to the infamous triple lock, have shone a fresh spotlight on the UK’s comparatively frugal retirement provision. The net replacement rate – the value of pension entitlements relative to individual net earnings – is below both the OECD and EU averages.
Unsurprisingly, only 17% of Brits believe the state pension will provide adequately for retirement, according to our recent survey of European consumers . That compares to an average of 34% across Europe.
This means private pension saving, much of it via workplace schemes, plays a more significant role in household saving than elsewhere on the continent.
To understand why, and to get a better sense of what households actually save by choice out of available income, we strip the headline savings figure back into three stages: first removing the impact of pension contributions, then housing investment, and finally pension-related investments.
Pension contributions are hugely relevant to the UK’s savings ratio, which measures the gap between households’ “total resources” and spending. Total resources means gross disposable income, plus net pension contributions.
Those contributions are valuable. But they aren’t much help when the cost of living bites today. While individuals may have some discretion over how much of their income goes into workplace pensions, for example, it’s not an obvious lever to pull – nor is it something that’s always under their full control.
So, when thinking about the savings ratio, it makes sense to look at what households are putting away from their disposable income alone. For most countries, this doesn’t make much difference. But for the UK, the impact is dramatic. That headline savings ratio of around 9% suddenly goes down to 5% once pension contributions are cut out. Compare that with Germany, which even under this alternative measure had a savings ratio of 17% in 2025.
But the story doesn’t stop there.
Savings have two destinations. They can be invested in the upkeep or improvement of houses and other fixed assets. That accounts for around two-thirds of gross savings, a similar proportion to the rest of Europe. It’s also pretty steady over time and doesn’t tend to vary within cycles.
The rest goes into financial assets or paying off debt. This is what most of us are really thinking about when it comes to household saving.
In the eurozone, our team has highlighted that financial saving is becoming more significant. The financial savings ratio (i.e., the share of household resources left for buying financial assets or reducing debt, after spending on housing) stood at 6% for the eurozone in 2025. Not only is that above pre-pandemic levels, but it’s risen above the US rate, too.
The same is true in Britain, though its financial savings ratio is lower at 4.2%.
The major difference, however, is where those financial savings end up.
Our big finding for the eurozone is that consumers now allocate as much of their savings to investment funds and ETFs as to deposits. That’s a recent development and is a stark contrast to the previous decade, where flows into deposits outpaced investment funds by three to one on average. That points to a growing appetite for DIY investing.
In the UK, the data shows it’s the complete opposite.
Here, a vast amount of financial saving ends up in pension funds. Not surprising, given what we said earlier about the important role of pension contributions in the overall savings ratio. And not helpful, either, in times of economic strain.
Instead, households are persistent net sellers of both investment trusts and equities, according to comparable national account data. And it means that, once debt repayments are included and inflows into pension funds are ignored, British households actually don’t save anything at all. And in fact, they are more often than not net borrowers.
Admittedly, everything we’ve said here is based on the national accounts, which are just one important, though imperfect, gauge of household saving behaviour. But it tallies with data on the UK’s long-running tax-free Stocks & Shares ISAs. While participation in Stocks & Shares ISA accounts has increased over time, the value of subscriptions to them has shown limited growth since the pandemic, while cash ISA subscriptions have risen much more strongly.
Separately, Bank of England data on the value of money held in household bank accounts also shows a fall of 8% in real terms since mid-2021. And real-terms saving is undershooting the pre-pandemic trend.
So what’s the conclusion?
It’s not that the household savings ratio in the UK can’t fall as cost of living pressures mount. In fact, that’s almost certainly what will happen.
But in practice, just as we saw in 2022, that would imply that, once the effect of pension saving is stripped out, households would become more significant net financial borrowers. Crucially, this is something that is unlikely to be the case elsewhere on the continent.
Hurtige nyheder er stadig i beta-fasen, og fejl kan derfor forekomme.
