Net Worth Calculator

How to calculate net worth

The formula is one line: assets minus debts. Add up your home at today's value, savings, ISAs, investments, pension pots, the car; subtract the mortgage balance, cards, loans. What is left is your net worth. The calculator above does the arithmetic and keeps a couple of decisions honest along the way, because two items genuinely divide opinion.

Pensions. Your pension pot is real money and legally yours, which argues for counting it. It is also locked until at least 55 (57 from 2028) and taxed on the way out, which argues for looking at the picture without it. The calculator refuses to pick silently: there is a toggle, and both totals stay visible either way. The ONS counts private pensions in its wealth figures, so if you want a like-for-like comparison with the medians, leave it on.

Student loans. Excluded by default here, and deliberately. Repayment is a percentage of income above a threshold, the balance is written off after 25 to 40 years, and mortgage lenders treat it as a deduction from pay rather than a debt. For most people it behaves like a tax, not a loan, and counting a £45,000 balance most of which will never be repaid produces a scarier number, not a truer one. The toggle is there if you disagree, and whether to pay it off early is its own question.

What counts as an asset, and at what value

The rule that keeps the number honest: today's sale value, not what you paid and not what it means to you. The car at what it would fetch this month, not the showroom price. The house at a realistic estimate, and if you do not have one, the postcode estimate tool will produce one from HM Land Registry data. Do not count the State Pension (it is income, not an asset you own), and do not count things you could not actually sell.

The calculator also shows a liquid figure: cash, ISAs and investments minus short-term debts. That is the money you could reach in a bad month without selling the house or raiding a pension, and for day-to-day financial resilience it matters more than the headline.

The average net worth by age in the UK

The honest benchmark comes from the ONS Wealth and Assets Survey (April 2020 to March 2022), and it measures households, by the age of the household head. The median household in Great Britain holds £293,700 including private pensions, or £181,700 without them.

Two things stop these tables being demoralising. They are household figures, so a single 30-year-old comparing against £109,800 is measuring themselves against couples with a mortgage deposit already spent. And the shape of the curve is mostly property and pensions compounding quietly for decades: the 55 to 64 median is thirty times the 16 to 24 one, and nobody got there by saving harder at 23. Wealth in the UK is overwhelmingly a function of time in the housing and pension markets, which is also why the median financial wealth column is so startlingly small at every age.

Tracking it over time

A net worth number is a photograph; the useful thing is the film. Save a snapshot on your device and the calculator shows the change when you come back, and if you tell it what you paid for your home and roughly when, the property line updates itself from each month's HM Land Registry index without you typing anything. Checking quarterly is the right cadence: often enough to catch drift, rare enough that market noise does not whipsaw you.