Britons are buying homes, having babies, getting married and retiring later – but one key life event is happening earlier
How old is the average Briton when they buy their first home, or finish paying their mortgage, or retire?
These are some of the questions answered in a “Journeying Through Life” data dump from the Office for National Statistics.
Here are some of the key takeaways…
Home ownership – including the one life event that’s happening earlier
People are buying homes later in life, perhaps unsurprisingly given how house prices have risen in the last decade or so.
In 2022, more than half of people owned their own home (either with a mortgage or outright) by the age of 36.
That’s a significant increase on 2004’s figures – which showed the average age for home ownership was 32.
This graph shows what proportion of people own homes at what age.
It isn’t all doom and gloom on the homes front, however, with the age at which people own their home outright (ie mortgage paid off) dropping from 63 (in 2004) to 61 in 2020.
This is pretty much the only life event happening earlier, however.
Retiring later
Again, this probably won’t come as a huge surprise, but people are retiring later.
The age where more than half of people were retired increased from 64 in 2011 to 66 in 2021.
There has been a bigger increase in average retirement age for women (from 61 years in 2011, to 66 years in 2021) than for men (from 65 in 2011 to 66 in 2021).
The ONS says this is because the state pension age for women was increased from 60 to 66 during this time to match men.
Gender pay gap shrinking but still present
The latest data shows that men are still, on the whole, being paid more than women – although the gender pay gap is shown to be shrinking.
For all employees, the gender pay gap was 14% in 2023 – compared with 20% in 2013.
Despite the gap shrinking, this graph shows that men’s hourly wages are higher than women’s at nearly all ages.
The grey shaded area represents the pay gap.
Another part of the data shows that males start work a touch earlier than women – with half of males in full-time employment by the age of 23 (compared with females at 24) in 2021.
That data could be explained by the fact that more women attend university – some 319,000 females compared with 285,000 males in 2022.
Moving out, marrying and having children
The age at which young people move out of their family homes is increasing, too.
In 2011, half of people were not living with their parents at the age of 21 – compared with 24 in 2022.
More men live with their parents than women, with 61% of adults living at home in 2021 were male.
When it comes to having children, the average age at which women have their first baby has risen to 29.
That’s up from an average of just 23 in 1970.
And finally, marriage.
The median age at first marriage has been steadily increasing since the 1960s.
For opposite sex couples married in 2020, the median age was 32 years for men and 30 years for women. For those entering into same-sex marriage, the median age was older, at 36 years for men and 32 years for women.
As well as getting married older, fewer people are getting married. In 2019, marriage rates had fallen to their lowest on record. For men, there were 18.6 marriages per 1,000 never-married men; for women, there were 17.2 marriages per 1,000 never-married women.
