I enjoy the comparisons, but it’s a lot more meaningful if you can compare people with similar age and income. I’d expect to look pretty bad next to some lawyer who works 90 hours/week and just made partner at age 30. But it’s not really meaningful to compare an engineer’s savings rate to a retail worker’s savings rate.

And the size of one’s retirement savings is really only useful if it takes into account the income (and thus, to some degree, lifestyle) of the saver as well. A $500K nestegg may be plenty for someone who’s lived on $20K his whole life, but may be insufficient for someone who’s making $100K.

I only bring this up because if you’re a benchmark type of person and you’re in your 20s, you may be thrown off by this stat. The $24,169 figure is most likely skewed toward the high end of the range of 401(k) balances for people in their 20s because it’s only counting people that have been saving for 6 or more years. Whereas the figures for the other age ranges are probably good marks for where you should be mid-range (i.e. mid-30s, mid-40s, etc.), for the 20-somethings it’s more like a mark of where you should be toward the end of your 20s.

For what it’s worth, I am a benchmark type of person; it’s good to track progress. But I don’t like this particular benchmark. It’s important to keep in mind what your benchmark actually means. In this case, it’s “Are you ahead, behind, or even with the national average?” But what does the national average have to do your quality of life in retirement? Probably nothing. It’s much better (but also much harder) to establish your own benchmark by calculating your anticipated retirement needs and backtracking to the present day based on your expected annual savings and expected investment rate-of-return.

Now (stepping off my soapbox) I’ve never gone through the trouble of actually performing those calculations, but I still think it’s a good idea, and one of these days I’ll get around to it.