Does the Personal Savings Rate Include 401(k) Contributions?

Yes, the personal savings rate does include 401(k) contributions. Both your elective deferrals and your employer’s matching contributions are counted as saving in the Bureau of Economic Analysis figure, because neither is a purchase of goods or services. The BEA’s logic is simple: any after-tax income you don’t spend on consumption or interest payments is “saving,” and money routed into a retirement account clearly isn’t spent.¹

How the BEA Gets to That Answer

The Bureau of Economic Analysis follows a two-step subtraction. It takes total personal income, removes federal, state, and local personal taxes to arrive at disposable personal income, then subtracts personal outlays. Whatever is left over is personal saving, and the savings rate is that leftover amount divided by disposable personal income.¹

Personal income here means wages, business income, rental earnings, dividends, interest, and government benefits like Social Security. Personal outlays are mostly consumer spending, plus interest payments on personal debt and certain transfers abroad. The rate is a residual measure. The BEA doesn’t track individual bank deposits or brokerage purchases; if a dollar of disposable income wasn’t spent on consumption, it counts as saving by default.

That residual approach is why the national rate moves around. The long-run average from 1959 through 2025 is roughly 8.4 percent, but recent monthly readings have hovered between 3.6 and 4.1 percent through the second half of 2025.²

Why Your Deferrals Count as Saving

When you contribute part of your paycheck to a 401(k), the money comes out of your gross pay before you see it. Despite that automatic deduction, the BEA still counts those wages as personal income. And because a 401(k) deferral isn’t a purchase, it doesn’t show up in personal outlays. The gap between income and outlays widens, and the contribution lands in the saving bucket.³

The same logic applies to IRA contributions. Whether you fund a traditional IRA, a Roth IRA, or a SEP-IRA, the money is income that wasn’t consumed, so it counts as saving in the national data.³ Roth and traditional contributions are treated the same way in the formula; the BEA doesn’t care whether tax was paid before or after the money went in.

For 2026, the elective deferral limit under Section 402(g) is $24,500. If you’re 50 or older, you can add a catch-up contribution of $8,000, bringing your ceiling to $32,500. Workers between 60 and 63 get a larger catch-up of $11,250 under a SECURE 2.0 provision, pushing their total to $35,750.⁴ Every dollar you defer up to those limits flows into the national savings rate.

How Employer Matches Fit In

Employer matches reach the same place by a slightly different route. The BEA classifies employer contributions to pension and retirement plans as “supplements to wages and salaries,” a category that also includes employer-paid health insurance and workers’ compensation premiums. These supplements are part of total compensation and therefore part of personal income, even though the money never appears on your paycheck.⁵

Because employer matches go directly into a retirement trust, they aren’t counted as personal outlays. That widens the gap between income and spending and adds to the national saving total. The BEA records these contributions on an accrual basis, recognizing them when the obligation arises rather than when the money settles in your account.⁵

For 2026, the combined total of your deferrals, the employer match, and any other employer contributions to a defined-contribution plan cannot exceed $72,000 under Section 415(c). Catch-up contributions don’t count toward that ceiling, so an older worker can shelter more.⁶

What the National Rate Leaves Out

The residual approach captures a lot, but it has blind spots. Knowing them helps explain why the headline number can look low even when household balance sheets are growing.

Capital gains don’t count. If your 401(k) balance jumps because the stock market rallied, none of that appreciation shows up in the savings rate. The BEA excludes capital gains from both personal income and personal saving because they represent price changes on existing assets, not new production.⁷
Home equity buildup is partly captured. Mortgage principal payments reduce your income without counting as consumption, so they’re treated as saving in the formula. But residential investment and mortgage borrowing themselves are not part of the personal saving calculation, and rising home values are excluded entirely.⁸
Asset price changes stay out. The BEA draws a hard line between saving (setting aside current income) and wealth (the total value of what you own). A rising 401(k) balance makes you wealthier, but it doesn’t change how much you saved from this year’s paycheck.⁸

So when the national rate sits at 3.6 percent, it isn’t saying Americans are only building wealth at 3.6 percent of income. It’s saying they’re only setting aside that much in new cash flow. Investment returns and home appreciation happen on top of the measured rate.

Why Your Personal Rate Will Look Different

The national savings rate is a macroeconomic snapshot, not a personal planning tool. It reflects the entire household sector, including retirees drawing down savings and people with no retirement accounts at all. A working adult actively contributing to a 401(k) should expect a personal rate well above the national average. If the two numbers are close, that’s a sign to revisit your contribution level.

To track your own progress, use a simpler formula: total annual saving divided by income, multiplied by 100. The numerator should include every dollar you’re setting aside: 401(k) deferrals, employer match, IRA contributions, HSA deposits, taxable brokerage contributions, and additions to cash reserves. The denominator is either your gross income or your take-home pay, and the choice changes the result.

Gross income as the base. An employee earning $100,000 who saves $15,000 (including the employer match) has a 15 percent rate. This gives a conservative view and matches most planner benchmarks.
Net income as the base. If that same employee takes home $75,000 after taxes, the rate jumps to 20 percent. This view shows how much of your spendable cash you’re preserving.

Pick one base and stick with it; switching between gross and net across years makes trend-tracking impossible. Many financial planners reference gross income when they suggest saving at least 15 percent annually, including any employer match.

Finding the numbers is straightforward. Your 401(k) deferral appears on your pay stub as a pre-tax deduction, or after-tax for Roth. The employer match usually shows up in your plan’s quarterly statement or on the year-to-date summary in the plan administrator’s portal. If you withdrew money from your 401(k) early and faced the 10 percent additional tax under Section 72(t), subtract that distribution from your saving total, because the money left the retirement system.⁹

One more boundary worth noting for your own bookkeeping: if you took a 401(k) loan, repayments going back into the plan are not plan contributions, according to the IRS.¹⁰ Counting loan repayments alongside fresh deferrals would overstate how much new saving you’re actually doing. The repayment restores money you already saved once; only the new deferral is new saving.

1
U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). Measuring How Much People Save: An Inside Look at the Personal Saving Rate
2
St. Louis Fed FRED. Personal Saving Rate (PSAVERT)
3
Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Are 401k and IRA Contributions Included in the National Savings Rate, and if So, How Is This Calculated?
4
Internal Revenue Service. 401(k) Limit Increases to $24,500 for 2026, IRA Limit Increases to $7,500
5
Bureau of Economic Analysis. CHAPTER 10: COMPENSATION OF EMPLOYEES
6
Internal Revenue Service. 2026 Amounts Relating to Retirement Plans and IRAs, as Adjusted for Changes in Cost-of-Living (Notice 2025-67)
7
U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). Income and Saving
8
Bureau of Economic Analysis. Housing Services in the National Economic Accounts
9
Internal Revenue Service. Retirement Topics – Exceptions to Tax on Early Distributions
10
Internal Revenue Service. Retirement Plans FAQs Regarding Loans