Joel has just landed his first graduate engineering job after several years of lower-paid roles. He is in his early twenties, lives with his parents and works in London. Instead of spending the extra money, or saving for a holiday or a house deposit, he is putting more of it into his workplace pension.
The reason is not optimism
He does not think he will get a state pension at all. And he is not unusual: around half of Gen Z — those born between 1997 and 2012 — say they do not expect the state pension to exist by the time they retire.
"I don't believe that I'll be a recipient of a state pension. I know a lot of people my age don't think they're going to be... There just won't be enough money," he says.
What is emerging among today's under-30s is not the usual distance young people feel from retirement. It is doubt. "It just mathematically doesn't make sense," Joel says. "There has to get to a point where that state pension is taking up too much of the budget and can't exist in the way that it exists right now."
The arithmetic behind the worry is real enough. The UK state pension age began rising in April from 66 to 67, reaching that by March 2028, and is due to rise again to 68 in twenty years — possibly sooner, since an independent review is under way.
What it means in Bangladesh
Read from Dhaka, the striking thing about this story is that Joel is worrying about losing something most Bangladeshis have never had.
Bangladesh has no universal state pension. Government employees have one; everyone else — which is the overwhelming majority, because roughly 85% of employment here is informal — has retired on family support, savings, land, or nothing. The Universal Pension Scheme launched in 2023 is the first serious attempt to change that, and it is contributory: what you get out depends on what you put in, starting now.
That makes the Gen Z instinct in this story the right one here, for a harder reason. A British twenty-something doubting the state pension still has automatic enrolment quietly building a workplace pot in the background. A Bangladeshi twenty-something has no such default. Nothing happens unless they start it.
Three things follow, and none of them require a large income. Time is the whole advantage — money put aside at 25 compounds for forty years, and no later contribution can make up for that gap. The vehicle matters less than the habit: a DPS at a bank, a monthly deposit scheme, sanchayapatra where eligible, or the pension scheme itself all beat the common alternative, which is holding savings as idle cash that inflation erodes.
And the specifically Bangladeshi trap is worth naming. A great many families here treat their children as the retirement plan. That was defensible when families were large and everyone stayed nearby. With falling birth rates, mass migration for work and the joint family thinning in cities, it is now a plan resting on one or two people who may not be in the country.
