Insights from the 2025 Aspen Leadership Forum on Retirement Savings

America’s retirement savings system represents both remarkable success and unfinished business. Since the introduction of the first 401(k) in the 1980s, workplace-based retirement accounts have amassed nearly $30 trillion in wealth, covering 54 percent of Americans and proving the system’s powerful wealth-building potential.

Yet this success remains incomplete and bypasses millions. Some 56 million American workers still lack access to workplace retirement plans, and another 23 million who do have access aren’t participating, missing out on a critical wealth-building opportunity.

For the last nine years, the Aspen Leadership Forum on Retirement Savings has served as a trusted space for cross-sector leaders to grapple with the central paradox of America’s retirement savings system: It generates immense wealth for millions, while still leaving too many behind. 

To close that gap, leaders are coalescing around three critical priorities, which comprise the Retirement Savings Lifecycle: Access, Save and Invest, Retire. Our report on the 2025 Forum digs into these three areas and offers a shared framework for the upgrades needed to ensure everyone can benefit from our retirement savings system. 

Looking ahead to the Forum’s 10th anniversary in 2026, this report charts a course for the future of this important convening and provides a vision for the next five years of the Retirement Savings Initiative at the Aspen Institute Financial Security Program. Ultimately, it’s our collective responsibility to decide who this system serves. The design choices we make—about access, incentives, defaults, and supports—will determine whether the next generation of retirees is more secure than the last. A system this consequential should work for everyone.

The Retirement Savings Lifecycle: Access, Save and Invest, Retire

Retirement is the ultimate financial report card—for individuals and for America. When Americans near the end of their careers, their financial situation reflects not just decades of the ups and downs of a financial life but also the strengths and failures of the retirement savings system itself. 

Informed by Forum conversations over the past nine years, we’ve created a visual for the lifecycle of retirement savers, offering a shared framework to understand the needs of savers across a lifetime.

In the full report, we explore each of these three criteria—Access, Save and Invest, and Retire—and explore the conditions shaping them, the solutions underway to close gaps, and the additional solutions and tools needed to finally deliver a finished retirement savings system where every American has an opportunity to succeed.