Countries With The Most Pension Wealth In 2025

Pension plans are a cornerstone of financial security for retirees, pooling trillions of dollars in assets globally to support aging populations.

This article was written by Marcus Lu and originally published by Visual Capitalist.

To learn more about this critical sector, we’ve visualized global pension wealth by country, based on January 2025 data from Global SWF.

Data and Key Takeaways

Public pension plans provide retirement and disability benefits to workers, and are regulated by public sector law.

They’re typically structured as defined benefit (DB) plans, meaning workers make mandatory contributions, then receive monthly benefits for the rest of their life after retiring.

The benefits one would receive is determined by a formula, which is typically a percentage of their average salary over their highest-earning years of work.

The numbers we used to create this graphic are included in the following table.

While the U.S. has the most pension wealth in the world, the world’s largest pension fund by assets belongs to Japan.

Established by the Japanese government in 2006, the Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF) is a recent product of the country’s pension system reform.

The GPIF invests in a 50/50 mix between stocks and bonds. Each of these components is further subdivided equally between domestic and international securities.

Largest U.S. Pension Funds

America’s largest public pensions are the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board (FRTIB), the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, and the California State Teachers Retirement System.

The FRTIB manages the Thrift Savings Plan, which covers a wide range of federal employees including postal service, Congress, and the military.

The latter two are California-based pension plans with the objective of providing benefits to the state’s public sector employees.

Challenges Facing Pensions

Pensions must invest their assets responsibly to ensure that they have sufficient cash flows to pay out member benefits.

This is not an easy task due to trends like global aging, which is increasing the percentage of retirees.

According to a recent report by Equable Institute, public pensions across the U.S. had a funding shortfall of $1.6 trillion in 2023. This is driving plans to seek riskier investments, which could cause problems in the future.