If you’re a woman planning for retirement, the numbers you’re working with aren’t the same as a man’s. In 2024, US life expectancy at age 65 was 20.8 years for women and 18.4 years.
And for the average retired woman, the monthly Social Security check that has to cover all of it was $1,780 as of December 2024, compared with $2,181 for retired men.
It is the actual arithmetic, and the plan you build on top of it should look different from what a couples-oriented retirement calculator spits out. Below are the five places where planning as a woman needs to diverge, and what you can actually do about each one.
A Longer Life Changes What Your Money Has to Do
The extra years change which financial products are worth having and which ones aren’t.
Social Security
If you’re going to be drawing that check for 20-plus years instead of 15, waiting is worth more to you than it is to your husband.
Given that women make up 95% of Social Security survivor beneficiaries, that decision is almost always being made for a wife who will outlive the man taking it.
Pensions
Pension formulas are built on unisex mortality tables, so the monthly benefit doesn’t adjust upward because the retiree is a woman.
That means the lifetime income stream is priced as though you’ll live an average length of time, and you probably won’t. Which makes taking the lump sum and rolling it into an IRA to manage yourself generally the worse deal for women.
A GAO review of 22 plan sponsors that offered lump-sum windows (roughly 498,000 participants and payouts topping $9.25 billion) found that lump sums often fell short of what it would cost to buy back the equivalent lifetime benefit on the open market, and the gap was widest for younger participants and for women. Take the monthly check.
Private annuities
When you buy an annuity from an insurance company, they DO factor in that you’re a woman, so the quote is priced for the long life you’re likely to have.
If you’re married and looking at annuities, run joint-life quotes as well as single-life; if you’re single, a single-life annuity covering baseline expenses like housing, food, insurance, and utilities can be worth pricing out, even if you never buy one.
Knowing the number puts the rest of your plan in perspective.
Sequence of Returns Risk Hits Harder
Because women live longer, it makes sense to hold more of the portfolio in stocks. Cash and bonds simply don’t keep up with the inflation of a retirement that runs for decades.
The trade-off is sequence-of-returns risk. That’s the danger that the market drops right as you start withdrawing, and the combination of a falling portfolio and ongoing withdrawals permanently impairs how long the money lasts.
Two retirees can average the same returns over 15 years and end up tens of thousands of dollars apart, purely because of the order in which those returns arrived.
The way around this is to organize your money by what you need it for and when. Keep anything you need to spend in the next two years in cash, so a bad market doesn’t force you to sell stocks at the wrong moment.
Money earmarked for travel (which tends to spike in the first several years of retirement) sits in something more conservative than the long-term pot.
Money you’re realistically not going to touch for 15 or 20 years, like the reserve for late-life care, can stay aggressively invested because it has time to ride out anything.
As you spend down the short-term buckets in the early years of retirement, your overall mix ends up MORE stock-heavy, not less, which is the opposite of the old “get more conservative every year” rule.
The long money keeps compounding while you’re spending the near money, and by the time you actually need the long money, it’s had 15 good years to grow.
One more thing worth knowing: real retirement spending isn’t flat. Research on the “retirement spending smile” found that allowing for a more realistic spending pattern raises the safe initial withdrawal rate to 4.73%. Meaning you can start with almost 15% less accumulated wealth than you’d otherwise need and still be fine.
Long-Term Care Is the Line Item Most Plans Underestimate
75% of women who reach 65 develop severe long-term services and supports needs before they die, compared with 64% of men. Women are about two-thirds more likely than men to receive long-term nursing home care over their lifetime, 34% versus 20%.
And they tend to need care for roughly twice as long as men, because their husbands are usually the ones providing informal care until they can’t, and then they die first.
In 2025, the national median rate for a semi-private nursing home room was $315 a day, or $114,975 a year. A private room was $355 a day, or $129,575 a year.
In-home non-medical caregiver services averaged $35 an hour, or $80,080 annually, assuming 44 hours of care a week. Private duty nursing at home runs closer to $90 an hour. And remember, these are median figures.
Medicare doesn’t generally cover this. Medicaid does cover it, but only after you’ve spent down to the asset limits, which is why over a nine-year period median household wealth fell 74% for single people who received nursing home care.
Private long-term care insurance exists, but relatively few people have coverage that can help defray these costs.
So the plan needs to name the money in advance. Some options: a dedicated long-term care insurance policy, a hybrid life-insurance-with-LTC-rider policy, or an earmarked chunk of your investment portfolio, invested aggressively because you likely won’t touch it for years.
What you don’t want is to reach the moment you need care and discover the answer is “whatever’s left when the checking account empties.”
The Widow’s Penalty and Why Estate Planning Is For You
There’s a tax quirk that ambushes surviving spouses, and most people don’t see it coming until the year after their husband dies. It’s called the widow’s penalty, or survivor’s penalty.
When your spouse dies, your tax filing status shifts from married filing jointly to single. Your income often doesn’t drop as much as you’d expect because Social Security continues, and you keep the higher of the two benefits, not both.
But the brackets you’re using are now the single brackets, which are narrower. In 2026, a surviving spouse filing single hits the 22% federal bracket at $50,401 of taxable ordinary income, compared with $100,801 as a married couple filing jointly.
On top of that, higher income can push Medicare Part B and Part D premiums up through the IRMAA surcharges, and certain tax breaks only available to married couples (spousal IRA contributions, higher credit thresholds) disappear.
Some of this is unavoidable, but planning ahead can soften the blow. Doing Roth conversions in the joint-filing years while both spouses are alive can move money out of the taxable column before the widow’s penalty hits.
Reviewing whose account is drawn down first, and in what order, matters more than it does for a couple who assume they’ll always file jointly.
Then there’s the paperwork side, which is separate from the tax side and equally important. Your will only directs assets without a named beneficiary or a surviving joint owner, so the designations on your accounts and policies deserve real attention. Review beneficiary designations annually.
Review your written estate plan, wills, and trusts every five years, or whenever something material has changed: a death, a marriage, a divorce, a new grandchild, a big move.
And yet more than half of American adults don’t have a will at all, according to the 2025 Caring.com wills survey.
The largest group without estate documents is the 35-to-54 cohort, the sandwich generation, who are least able to afford the chaos of dying intestate.
Caregiving and the Career Hit Nobody Adds Up
Three in five family caregivers in the United States are women, and the average caregiver is 51. 29% of family caregivers are in the sandwich generation, supporting both children and aging parents at the same time. Among caregivers under 50, that figure rises to 47%.
Women who take time out of the paid workforce to care for children or aging parents spend, on average, 12 fewer years earning income. Twelve years of missed Social Security credits, missed pension accrual, missed compounding on savings.
Meanwhile, median weekly earnings for women working full-time are 16% lower than for men, roughly a $10,000 annual gap, and women receive about $4,800 less annually in Social Security retirement benefits.
And it’s a big part of why single women 65 and older have a Supplemental Poverty Measure poverty rate of 21.4%, compared with 10.9% for married women the same age. The poverty rate for older women overall rose from 15.0% to 16.2% between 2023 and 2024, while it was unchanged for older men at 13.5%.
Keep contributing to a retirement account even if you’re working reduced hours. And if you’re the one cutting back, sit down with your spouse and agree in writing how retirement contributions will be split between your accounts during the caregiving years, so if the marriage doesn’t last, the retirement money isn’t only in his name.
And if you’re taking care of everyone else, put your own financial check-in on the calendar the way you’d put a doctor’s appointment on it. The mental and physical strain of caregiving makes it easy to lose sight of your own money.
## Sources
nwlc.org. https://nwlc.org/resource/social-security-is-vital-to-older-womens-financial-security/
Products. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db548.htm
gao.gov. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-15-74
What is the Widow’s Tax Penalty?. https://help.holistiplan.com/what-is-the-widows-tax-penalty
aspe.hhs.gov. https://aspe.hhs.gov/reports/what-lifetime-risk-needing-receiving-long-term-services-supports-0
investor.genworth.com. https://investor.genworth.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1054/carescout-releases-2025-cost-of-care-survey-results
aarp.org. https://www.aarp.org/pri/topics/work-finances-retirement/social-security/social-security-women/.
2025 Wills and Estate Planning Study. https://www.caring.com/resources/wills-survey
aarp.org. https://www.aarp.org/caregiving/basics/caregiving-in-us-survey-2025/
Caregiving in the US 2025. https://www.aarp.org/pri/topics/ltss/family-caregiving/caregiving-in-the-us-2025/
boldin.com. https://www.boldin.com/retirement/what-is-sequence-of-returns-risk/
What Is The ‘Retirement Spending Smile’?. https://www.mcleanam.com/what-is-the-retirement-spending-smile/)
Disclaimer: The content in this article is for informational purposes only and is not intended as financial, investment, or tax advice. Always consult a qualified financial advisor or tax professional before making decisions about your money, investments, or retirement planning.
Kylie Lang is a nationally syndicated travel journalist with bylines on the Associated Press Wire & more, a lifestyle writer, and the founder and editor of Your Lifestyle Library (yourlifestylelibrary.com). She holds a BA (Honours) in History from the University of Kent and is a member of the British Guild of Travel Writers.