Does Your Job Title Dictate Your Retirement? The Best and Worst Saving Sectors

The industry on a worker’s pay stub does more than set their salary. It quietly shapes how much they will have at retirement. Vanguard’s 2025 How America Saves report, which tracks roughly five million participants in defined contribution plans, finds that the gap between the highest- and lowest-saving sectors is wide enough to translate into six-figure differences in median account balances. Layer on the broader economic backdrop, with the savings rate at 4% in the fourth quarter of 2025 and consumer sentiment at 53.3 in March 2026, and the sector a paycheck comes from carries measurable weight in retirement outcomes.

The Participation Gap: Finance Leads, Retail Lags

Plan participation is the first dividing line. According to Vanguard’s 2025 How America Saves report, employees in finance, insurance, and real estate have a plan-weighted participation rate of 75%. Wholesale and retail trade employees come in at a plan weighted rate of 54%.

The deferral rate compounds the difference. Finance participants set aside an average of 7.4% of pay, compared with 6.9% for wholesale and retail trade. Across a 30-year career with employer matching, that gap compounds materially.

Median Balances Tell the Cumulative Story

The clearest illustration of how these gaps compound is the median account balance by industry. Vanguard reports that media, entertainment, and leisure workers carry a median balance of $102,681, while transportation and utilities workers sit at $15,329.

A quick reminder on how these numbers work: if ten workers each have $5,000 in a 401(k) and one executive walks in with $5 million, the median is still $5,000, but the mean jumps to $459,000. Medians filter out the high earners and long-tenured savers, leaving a number closer to what a typical employee in that industry actually holds. According to the report, the average balance of $148,153 is actually indicative of a participant at the 75th percentile.

Sector Profitability Sets the Ceiling

Employer capacity for benefits tracks closely with sector profits. Bureau of Economic Analysis data for the fourth quarter of 2025 shows financial sector profits of $897.1 billion, up from $742.2 billion a year earlier. Information sector profits reached $317.7 billion. Retail came in at $415.8 billion, slightly below the prior year, and wholesale fell to $229.6 billion from $296.0 billion.

Value added across the economy, which BEA pegs at $31,422.5 billion in the fourth quarter, breaks down with finance at 8.1% of GDP and information at 5.6%, both growing. Manufacturing’s share has slipped from 10.2% in late 2023 to 9.4%. Stronger and growing sectors carry more room for matching contributions, profit-sharing, and richer plan defaults.

Plan Design Does Much of the Work

While different sectors show different saving behaviors, plan design is the most powerful tool for closing the gap. Automatic enrollment plans achieve a 94% participation rate, compared with just 64% in voluntary enrollment plans. This feature is a major driver in sectors like manufacturing, where 77% of plans use it to boost numbers, compared with 49% in education and health care.

Industry Ranking Median at a Glance

1. Media, entertainment, and leisure: $102,681
2. Finance, insurance, and real estate: $62,316
3. Agriculture, mining, and construction: $50,911
4. Business, professional, and nonprofit: $44,089
5. Manufacturing: $38,803
6. Education and health: $29,978
7. Wholesale and retail trade: $25,651
8. Transportation, utilities, and communications: $15,329

Practical Implications

The Vanguard data shows that the “gold standard” for a total contribution rate is between 12% and 15% of pay. Currently, the median combined value of plans that offer both matching and nonmatching employer contributions is 8.0%. This means the employer is often doing more than half the work for participants aiming for that 15% target.

Plans that use automatic escalation capture most of the participation lift seen in the data. With 69% of auto-enrollment plans now using this feature, 45% of all participants saw their savings rate increase in 2024 without having to make an active decision. For those looking for tax flexibility, 86% of plans now offer a Roth option, which 18% of participants use across the board.