A look at the financial position of pensioners and near-pensioners using HFCS data
Glenn Abela
The scope of this paper is twofold. First, it aims to provide some measures of pension adequacy, gauging how pension incomes compare to labour incomes and to household expenditure levels. Such results can serve to cross-check insights from other data sources, including reports such as the recent 2024 Pension Adequacy Report (PAR) by the European Commission. Second, by seeking to analyse comprehensively the level and composition of the wealth of households close to or at pension age, and how it interacts with their income and expenditure, it complements previous work which combined data from the 2015 wave of the Household Budgetary Survey (HBS) and the 2017 wave of the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) to characterise in detail the saving behaviour of Maltese households. The present article employs data from the HFCS, including more recent data from the 2021 wave, to analyse several aspects of the financial position of households close to or at pension age.
Pensions Strategy Group, Supplementary Paper No. 4
https://endpoint-socialsecurity0001lwesa-agd2b3ekccdcasam.a01.azurefd.net/content/2026/07/2025-PSG-Report-Supplementary-Paper-4-FINAL.pdf