Retirement Preparedness by Industry

Retirement plan services startup Human Interest has crunched the numbers on which workers are most and least prepared for retirement.

San Francisco-based Human Interest Inc., which has funding from asset manager BlackRock Inc., worked with OnePoll to survey 2,000 U.S. workers across 11 industries about their retirement saving activities and attitudes this August.

The researchers polled the workers on nine retirement-related factors to come up with the results. They asked the workers about:

• Overall confidence in a comfortable retirement;
• If the employer offers a retirement plan;
• Eligibility for an employer retirement plan;
• Actively saving in a 401(k) or 403(b);
• If the employer is contributing between 11 and 15%;
• Amount in retirement fund (above $100,000);
• Amount in emergency fund (above $1,000);
• Expected reliance on family members in retirement; and
• Likelihood of “pretiring” (stopping or reducing work prior to full retirement).

The chart below starts by showing those fields that fell below the average retirement preparedness for the group, follow by those that were above the average. The least prepared group overall was the hospitality sector, while technology (computers and electronics) ranked highest.

Retirement Preparedness By Sector

Source: Human Interest

Access to a high-quality workplace retirement savings plan certainly plays a role in preparedness, according to the research findings. The highest-ranked tech workers are the most likely to be offered a retirement plan, while the second-highest ranked finance employees are the second-most likely to have access to a plan, according to the survey.

“It’s critical that employers across all industries not only offer retirement plans, but also make sure these plans are employee-friendly,” Rakesh Mahajan, chief revenue officer for Human Interest, said in a statement with the report.

Among private industry workers in the U.S., 69% have access to an employer-provided retirement plan, according to a February report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Of that group, 75% choose to participate in the plan.

Human Interest posted the full rankings of industries by retirement preparedness.