Understanding how different audiences engage with their pensions

Pension engagement varies enormously in the UK. While some people are confident and proactive about planning for retirement, others are totally disengaged from the subject. This can make a huge difference in terms of the decisions people make, the support they seek and the outcomes they achieve. 

Low engagement in pensions can mean that people are unaware of whether they are on track for the retirement they want or are expecting.

To better understand the overall picture of the UK’s engagement with their pensions, MaPS carried out new analysis of our MoneyView survey data. MoneyView included questions on retirement planning, which were asked to around 5,000 working age adults.

From this, we can identify five clear ‘pension engagement segments’, each with their own needs and challenges. This research provides valuable insight into how different groups think, feel and act when it comes to retirement planning.

Our aim was to understand how people’s actions and attitudes towards pensions affected their level of engagement. We wanted to survey people across the working-age population (18-65) to understand the wide range of views held about retirement planning.

Our goal was to use this research to group people who shared attitudes and behaviours, regardless of their current pension outlook. We were keen to avoid using demographics, income or pension holding information to define our segments as these don't always give a clear picture of how engagement could be improved.

By focussing on people’s attitudes, we aimed to create research that would help us understand how to increase people’s engagement and consider whether different messages to different groups might be needed to encourage them to take action.

We define pension engagement as ‘the level of involvement, interest and actions in relation to pension planning and saving’. This could include checking statements, keeping details up-to-date, or comparing potential pension income with expectations.

Our recently-published MoneyView 2025 study looked at the financial attitudes and behaviours of people across the UK. We included a dedicated section within the study around retirement planning and pensions.

For this study, we asked people around 30 questions covering:

• attitudes towards pension saving
• actions taken in the past year (ranging from basic interactions such as opening pension statements and talking to friends or family, to actively managing or changing their pension investments) and
• pension holdings and pension types.

Using data collected from the study, we carried out factor analysis to uncover patterns linking people’s attitudes to their actions. Factor analysis sorts variables with similar characteristics into groups, which helped us to reduce the 30 attitude questions down to a smaller number of themes.

Three of these themes were strongly linked to the number of pensions actions people took:

• knowledge and planning
• confusion (low confidence)
• being too busy to think about pensions.

We then used clustering techniques to help us process the data and group people with similar patterns of pension attitudes and behaviours. This allowed us to create five distinct ‘pension engagement segments’, each showing a different mix of confidence, knowledge and actions or interactions with their pensions.

There are five distinct groups highlighted by the research:

• Disengaged and inactive (10.5m people) – people in this segment have low knowledge and confidence, and take very few pension-related actions or interactions. Many (43%) lack a workplace or private pension altogether. This group tends to be a bit younger and has lower overall financial wellbeing.
• Confused and concerned (6.2m people) – people in this segment are interested in their pension, but intimidated by the thought. They often want to engage but find pensions difficult to understand. 62% of this segment are women, and 54% are over 45 years old.
• Confused and too busy (10.7m people) – this segment tends to be younger people who are distracted by other priorities. They’ve usually made some basic pension interactions, but generally see retirement planning as something to think about later.
• Confident and passive (9.4m people) – people in this segment believe their retirement planning is in good stead, but this may be over-confidence that could mask gaps in their planning. Given their levels of claimed knowledge, they don’t appear to undertake much by way of regular behaviours and actions with their pensions, such as logging in to their pension provider’s portal.
• Confident and proactive (3.8m people) – people in this segment are highly engaged, and take multiple pension actions and interactions a year. They’re often already using online portals or professional advice to help with their retirement planning. They are also the segment most likely to have contacted their pension provider recently.

From this, we can see that engagement doesn’t sit on a straightforward spectrum of ‘low’ to ‘high’. Barriers to increased levels of engagement are quite distinct from one another, and different attitudes and behaviours come into play.

The findings from this research have helped us to better understand the barriers to pension engagement amongst the UK population.

More specifically, these segments are helpful when it comes to user testing and promoting our forthcoming MoneyHelper Pensions Dashboard (MHPD).

Pensions dashboards will enable individuals to access their pensions information online, securely and all in one place, thereby supporting better planning for retirement and improving financial wellbeing.

We’ve considered how this will affect each of these segments:

• The ‘disengaged and inactive’ group are a key focus for MaPS as an organisation, but as many either have no pension or are facing more immediate financial concerns, the MHPD may be of lower relevance to this group.
• Many people in the ‘confident and proactive’ group are probably already highly engaged in their pension information and the MHPD might not add as much in terms of new knowledge compared to other groups.
• The other three groups (confused and concerned, confused and too busy, confident and passive) are where we see significant potential for improving both knowledge and confidence in terms of pension planning. Each have their own specific emotional barriers and attitudes that will need overcoming, and we can explore these further as we begin user testing of the MHPD programme.

Following extensive collaboration with industry, Senior Policy and Propositions Manager Adam Gifford has shared our consumer testing approach for the MoneyHelper Pensions Dashboard.

You can read Adam's blog on the Pensions Dashboards Programme websiteOpens in a new window.

• MoneyView 2025 is our flagship survey conducted amongst a nationally representative sample of over 12,000 adults living in the UK, providing extensive research into the UK’s financial wellbeing. The pension engagement segmentation was developed from questions asked within MoneyView to drill deeper into pension and retirement attitudes and behaviours.
• Pensions Dashboards ProgrammeOpens in a new window gives an overview of our pensions dashboards work and provides updates on progress.
• Our research page shows the latest pieces of work carried out by MaPS.