How much super Australians have, by age

Each year the ATO publishes how much superannuation Australians hold, broken down by age band and by sex. The figures on this page are from ATO Taxation Statistics 2023-24 — balances & income as at 30 June 2024. They are balances for people who have superannuation. Someone with no super account at all is not counted, which matters most at the youngest and oldest ends of the table.

Two numbers are published for each group. The median is the balance of the middle person once the group is lined up from smallest to largest. The average is the total held by the group divided by the number of people in it. The two are nowhere near each other, and the distance between them is the most informative thing in the whole table.

Median and average balance, by age band and sex

ATO Taxation Statistics 2023-24, balances at 30 June 2024. Across everyone in the release the median is $63,339 and the average is $182,781.

Why the average is so much larger than the median

The all-ages average is 2.9 times the all-ages median. That ratio is the signature of a long right-hand tail: a relatively small number of very large balances pull the mean upwards while doing nothing at all to the middle of the distribution. Doubling one person's multi-million-dollar balance moves the average for the entire group; it does not move the median by a cent.

The tail lengthens with age. In the 25-29 band the median man holds $21,742 and the average man $29,044 — a difference of $7,302, because almost nobody has had time to accumulate a balance large enough to skew anything. By 60-64 the median man holds $236,126 and the average man $413,700, a difference of $177,574. For women in that band the median is $174,655 against an average of $327,440.

The two measures answer different questions. The median describes where the middle of the distribution sits. The average describes how large the pool of money is. A headline that quotes one figure and describes the other misreads the distribution.

The gap between men and women

Across all ages the ATO's median is $71,914 for men and $57,688 for women — a difference of 19.8%. That single figure conceals a great deal of movement.

In the 18-24 band the median gap is 9.3%, and at 25-29 it narrows to 3.2% — the narrowest of any band before 65, a difference of only $694. From there it opens steadily: 11.4% at 30-34, 22.1% at 35-39, 26.1% at 40-44 and 28.4% at 45-49. It is at its widest in the 50-54 band, at 30.1% — the largest median gap of any adult band. At 60-64, the last full band before Age Pension age, the median man holds $236,126 and the median woman $174,655, a gap of 26.0%.

After that the pattern reverses. At 65-69 the median gap has fallen to 10.2%, and by 70-74 the median woman's balance ($228,978) is slightly above the median man's ($227,027). The averages tell a different story in the same bands: the average man aged 75 or more holds $562,305 against $484,818 for women. On a broad ATO and ASFA aggregate, women hold 43.6% of Australia's superannuation assets.

What the data can and cannot tell you about why

The published table has three variables: age, sex and balance. It measures the size and shape of the gap precisely. It contains nothing about hours worked, occupation, time out of the paid workforce, contribution history, insurance premiums deducted or investment option, so it cannot on its own establish what causes the gap. Any explanation drawn from this table alone is an inference, not a finding.

What can be stated from the same ATO release is arithmetic. The Super Guarantee is a percentage of ordinary time earnings — 12% — so employer contributions scale directly with pay, and differences in pay are transmitted into balances with no further mechanism required. In the same release, on the ATO's all-individuals basis — which includes people with nil taxable income — the median taxable income was $67,904 for men and $51,419 for women. Balances also compound, so a difference in contributions early in a working life has more years to grow than the same difference late in one.

Beyond that, attributing causes is a question for research that can observe individual careers over time. A cross-sectional table of balances cannot do it, and this article does not attempt to.

A snapshot of different people, not one person's life

It is tempting to read the age bands as a path: start here at 25, arrive there at 60. They are not a path. Each band is a different group of people, photographed on the same day — 30 June 2024. The people in the 65-69 band are not the people in the 30-34 band thirty-five years on. They worked under different Super Guarantee rates, different contribution caps, different markets and different rules about when super could be taken out.

That is visible at the top of the table. Median balances for men peak at 60-64 and then decline — $230,766 at 65-69, $227,027 at 70-74 and $200,477 at 75 or more — while the averages keep climbing all the way to $562,305. Arithmetically, a falling median alongside a rising mean means the middle of the distribution is shrinking while the upper tail is not. Preservation age, the point from which super can generally be accessed, is 60 for anyone born on or after 1 July 1964, and Age Pension age is 67.

One further caveat on what a “balance” is. ATO and APRA data on account numbers shows that in 2022, 76% of people held a single super account and 18% held two. Separately, the ATO holds in the order of $16 billion in lost and unclaimed superannuation.

The current rules that set the pace

Three current rules set how quickly a balance can be added to. The table above is the accumulated result of decades of earlier versions of them.

• Super Guarantee. Employers must contribute 12% of ordinary time earnings to a complying fund. The rate has been 12% since 1 July 2025 and is unchanged for 2026-27.
• Concessional contributions cap. $32,500 for 2026-27, indexed up from $30,000 on 1 July 2026. It is a single cap covering employer contributions, salary sacrifice and personal deductible contributions combined. Contributions inside the cap are taxed at 15% on the way into the fund.
• Non-concessional contributions cap. $130,000 for 2026-27 — four times the concessional cap — for contributions made from money that has already been taxed.

Because the Super Guarantee is a fixed percentage, the balances in the table are, to a first approximation, a record of lifetime earnings multiplied by decades of investment returns and reduced by fees, insurance premiums and contributions tax. The fees guide works through the second of those.

Reading a balance against the table

The comparison tool on the home page uses this same ATO table to show where a given balance sits within its age band, and the full superannuation tool projects a balance forward under the contribution rules above. The salary sacrifice and contribution calculators set out the arithmetic of the caps and the 15% contributions tax.

What this table cannot do is say what any particular balance ought to be. It is a description of what a population held on one day, not a benchmark and not a target. Whether a balance is adequate for a given person depends on things the ATO does not publish — when they intend to stop work, what they hold outside super, whether they own their home outright, their health, their partner's position and what they expect to spend. Those are matters for a licensed financial adviser, a registered tax agent or the relevant authority; ASIC's MoneySmart publishes free, independent government guidance on how superannuation works.