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March 27, 2013
TO: RESEARCH COMMITTEE No. 7-13PENSION OPERATIONS ADVISORY COMMITTEE No. 7-13
PENSION MEMBERS No. 14-13 RE: RETIREMENT ASSETS TOTAL $19.5 TRILLION IN FOURTH QUARTER 2012
Today, ICI released the quarterly retirement market update with data through the fourth quarter of 2012. Total U.S. retirement assets, which reached a new record high, were $19.5 trillion as of December 31, 2012, up 0.7 percent in the fourth quarter and up 8.6 percent for the year. As of the end of 2012, retirement assets were 44.4 percent higher than they were on March 31, 2009, when retirement assets hit a low during the recession, and 7.9 percent higher than their pre-recession peak on September 30, 2007. Retirement savings accounted for 36 percent of all household financial assets in the United States at the end of 2012. [1]
Individual retirement accounts (IRAs) continued to be the largest single component of the U.S. retirement market, holding $5.4 trillion in assets at year-end 2012. IRA assets rose 1.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012 and 11.0 percent over the year as a whole. Forty-six percent of IRA assets were invested in mutual funds at year-end.
Defined contribution (DC) plans held $5.1 trillion in assets at year-end 2012, with 401(k) plans accounting for $3.6 trillion of that total. DC plan assets experienced similar growth as IRAs—rising 0.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012 and about 10.1 percent over the year. Fifty-seven percent of DC plan assets were invested in mutual funds at year-end 2012.
Target date mutual fund assets continued to grow and totaled $481 billion at year-end 2012. Retirement accounts held the vast majority of target date mutual fund assets, with 19 percent of the total held in IRAs and 72 percent held in DC plans.
The full report is available along with the Mutual Fund Assets in Retirement Accounts statistical release.
If you have any questions concerning these data, please contact Erin Short at 202/326-5940 or eshort@ici.org.
Sarah Holden
Senior Director, Retirement & Investor Research
endnotes
[1] At year-end 2012, U.S. households’ total financial assets were $54.4 trillion. See Federal Reserve Board, Flow of Funds Accounts, Z.1 Release, Washington, DC: Federal Reserve Board (March 2013), available at www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/current/.