How Does Your Super Stack Up?

Superannuation balances are easy to compare. Retirement adequacy is not.

A headline target or peer average can be useful context, but it is a poor substitute for a retirement capital model built around actual objectives. The amount required depends on the lifestyle to be funded, the age at which work becomes optional, the desired level of capital preservation, the location of assets and the risks a family is prepared to carry.

Super is also only one structure within a broader balance sheet. Retirement wealth may sit across superannuation, companies, trusts, direct property, private investments and personal portfolios. The task is to understand how those assets work together, not simply whether a super balance is above or below an industry benchmark.

Start with the benchmark, then interrogate the assumptions

The ASFA Retirement Standard provides a useful reference point. For the March quarter of 2026, ASFA estimated that homeowners aged 65 to 84 required annual expenditure of approximately $78,566 for a couple and $55,923 for a single person to support what it defines as a comfortable retirement. It estimated superannuation savings at age 67 of $730,000 for a couple and $630,000 for a single person.

Those numbers are often quoted as targets, but their assumptions matter. ASFA's lump sum estimates assume retirees own their home, draw down their capital and receive at least some Age Pension over retirement. They also use defined assumptions for investment earnings and wages growth.

For many families, those assumptions will not reflect the objective. Higher discretionary spending, substantial travel, support for adult children, private healthcare, multiple properties, philanthropy or a meaningful estate can materially increase the capital required. Equally, someone intending to preserve real capital rather than consume it should not use a drawdown-to-zero model as their primary reference point.

The benchmark is therefore most useful as a starting question: comfortable by whose definition, and under what assumptions? A retirement plan should translate the household's own definition of a good retirement into a long-term cash flow requirement, then determine which assets will fund it and with what degree of certainty.

Peer balances provide context, not an answer

ASFA's analysis of Australian Taxation Office data shows how widely retirement savings are distributed. At June 2023, men aged 60 to 64 with superannuation had an average balance of $395,582 and a median of $219,773. For women, the average was $313,360 and the median $163,218. Around 23% of women in that age group had no superannuation, compared with 13% of men.

The gap between the average and median is itself instructive. A relatively small number of high balances pull the average higher, which means a simple comparison with the national average can create false comfort or unnecessary concern. The more useful comparison is against the capital required to fund a household's own liabilities and objectives.

That requires a bottom-up model: expected after-tax spending, inflation, longevity, investment returns, sequencing risk, large one-off expenses, family commitments, tax and estate objectives. The output should not be a single immutable number. It should be a range of outcomes under different assumptions, with a clear view of which variables matter most and where there is capacity to adapt.

A useful model also separates recurring lifestyle expenditure from discretionary and legacy capital. Funding core living costs for 30 years is a different objective from preserving a pool for children, maintaining a holiday property or making future philanthropic gifts. Treating every dollar as though it has the same purpose can lead to an investment strategy that is either unnecessarily conservative or insufficiently resilient.

Retirement risk is more than market volatility

One of the most important variables is the order in which returns occur. A sharp market decline early in retirement, when a portfolio is also funding withdrawals, can have a greater long-term effect than the same decline later. This sequencing risk is why the transition from accumulation to drawdown deserves its own portfolio and liquidity strategy rather than simply continuing the pre-retirement settings.

Liquidity can be deliberately segmented. Capital required for near-term spending can be held differently from assets intended to fund later decades or intergenerational objectives. This can reduce the need to sell growth assets at an unfavourable time while allowing longer-horizon capital to remain invested through market cycles.

Longevity matters in the opposite direction. Reducing risk too aggressively at retirement can create a different problem if the portfolio fails to maintain purchasing power over several decades. The objective is not to eliminate volatility. It is to ensure the family has enough liquidity and flexibility to tolerate it while still earning the return required by the plan.

Super is a tax structure, not the retirement plan

Superannuation remains an important tax-advantaged environment, but for larger balance sheets its role needs to be considered alongside other structures. Contribution strategies can include employer and salary sacrifice contributions, personal deductible contributions, non-concessional contributions, contribution splitting, downsizer contributions and, in appropriate circumstances, amounts contributed under the small business CGT concessions. For eligible family members, government super co-contributions may also be relevant where the income and contribution requirements are met. Eligibility, caps and total super balance rules can materially affect what is available.

Starting earlier matters because many of these strategies operate within annual limits, eligibility rules and timing windows. A family that begins planning several years before retirement may be able to shift capital gradually, use available contribution capacity and align ownership structures without forcing large transactions into a short period. Waiting until the year of retirement can materially reduce the range of available options.

The tax settings for large balances are also changing. From 1 July 2026, Division 296 reduces the tax concessions available for individuals with total super balances above the legislated large balance thresholds. For 2026-27, the large super balance threshold is $3 million and the very large balance threshold is $10 million. That reinforces the need to assess super within the context of the whole family balance sheet rather than automatically maximising one structure without considering the marginal benefit.

The relevant question is therefore not whether super is attractive in isolation. It is how additional capital should be allocated across superannuation and other structures after considering tax, access, flexibility, estate treatment, investment opportunity and the family's future spending needs.

That is where financial modelling becomes more useful than a benchmark. At Core, retirement planning starts with the life an individual or family wants to fund and works backwards. Different retirement ages, spending assumptions, investment returns, ownership structures and estate objectives can be tested to understand the capital required and how resilient the strategy may be under different conditions. The process can identify a shortfall, but it can also identify the opposite problem: a family restricting its lifestyle unnecessarily because it has never established what level of spending its wealth could sustainably support. The plan is then reviewed as circumstances change rather than treated as a one-off calculation.

The real retirement question

The most useful retirement planning question is not, 'How much super should I have?' It is, 'What does my capital need to fund, for how long, under what constraints, and with what margin for uncertainty?'

From there, the strategy becomes clearer. The appropriate asset allocation can be linked to the required return rather than a default risk profile. Liquidity can be set against known spending and commitments. Contributions and withdrawals can be coordinated with tax and estate objectives. Capital intended for the next generation can be separated conceptually from capital required to fund lifestyle.

The model should also be revisited as circumstances change. Retirement dates move, spending evolves, markets reprice, tax rules change and family commitments emerge. A plan that was robust at 55 may need different assumptions at 62, particularly after a business sale, inheritance, property transaction or change in family structure.

Retirement adequacy is ultimately an asset and liability exercise. Industry benchmarks are useful for orientation, but they cannot tell a family whether it has enough. That answer comes from understanding the lifestyle the capital needs to support, the legacy objectives it may also need to serve, and the structure capable of delivering both through a range of market and life outcomes.

References and sources

1. Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia (ASFA). ASFA Retirement Standard, March quarter 2026.
2. Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia (ASFA). An update on superannuation account balances, 2025, based on ATO data as at June 2023.
3. Australian Taxation Office (ATO). Contributions caps, last updated 24 April 2026.
4. Australian Taxation Office (ATO). Government contributions, last updated 27 April 2026.
5. Australian Taxation Office (ATO). Division 296 tax on large super balances, last updated 29 June 2026.
6. Core Wealth Advisors. B2B Services Brochure, 2026.

Sources accessed 11 August 2026. Data and regulatory settings may change over time.