🇮🇪 Ireland·ECB household survey · 2023
Am I rich in Ireland, if you don't count the house?
Type what your household holds in savings and investments. Property and state pension entitlements stay out of it.
My household holds € in savings and investments.
Count bank and savings deposits, mutual funds, bonds, listed shares, voluntary pension plans and whole life insurance, and money owed to you. Leave out the home, other property, vehicles, business equity, and entitlements from state or workplace pension schemes.
Households in Ireland you hold more than
50%
Above the middle
Past the €15,900 median. Worth remembering how low that bar sits: half of all holders are below it.
€15,900 is right at the €15,900 median for Ireland. Half of the households that hold any financial assets sit below that line, and half above it.
The published ladder
Where savings and investments actually sit in Ireland.
Among the 98.1% of households in Ireland that hold any financial asset, the median total is €15,900 and the mean is €83,300. The gap between them is the story: a small number of large portfolios pull the average far above the middle. Across the euro area the median is €16,600.
Tenth percentile
€600
A tenth of the households with any financial assets in Ireland hold no more than this.
Median
€16K
Half hold less than this. The mean is €83K, which is what a handful of large portfolios does to an average.
Ninetieth percentile
€199K
The top tenth in Ireland starts here. The survey publishes nothing above it, so there is no top 1% number.
€15,900 places you above 50% of the households in Ireland that hold any financial asset.
Against the euro area as a whole you would be above 49% rather than 50%.
Who owns what
Almost every household in Ireland has a bank account. After that it thins out fast.
4.8% of households in Ireland hold mutual funds and 11.8% own listed shares directly, against 14.2% and 11.4% across the euro area. Deposits are close to universal everywhere. Everything below them is a minority position, and that is what makes the medians in the next column so much larger than the median for the whole country.
Asset
Households owning
Median among owners
Deposits
98.0%
€8,700Euro area: 99.1% own it
Mutual funds
4.8%
€49,200Euro area: 14.2% own it
Bonds
9.9%
€800Euro area: 3.5% own it
Listed shares
11.8%
€8,200Euro area: 11.4% own it
Money owed to the household
3.4%
€4,100Euro area: 6.6% own it
Voluntary pension and life insurance
20.7%
€33,600Euro area: 27.5% own it
Other financial assets
7.4%
€5,400Euro area: 11.2% own it
Ownership is compared with the euro-area rate on every row. Medians are among the households that own that asset, so a large median tells you nothing about how common the asset is.
- Most financial-asset values in Ireland come from administrative registers rather than survey answers, which usually makes them more accurate but changes what some categories cover.
Where the money sits
What financial wealth in Ireland is actually made of.
40.7% of financial wealth in Ireland sits in deposits, against 44.1% across the euro area, and 29.5% sits in voluntary pension plans and life insurance. The mix decides how much of it is invested at all, which over a decade matters more than the total.
Deposits40.7% · EA 44.1%
Mutual funds9.0% · EA 13.3%
Bonds2.3% · EA 3.0%
Listed shares9.0% · EA 9.7%
Money owed to the household0.8% · EA 1.8%
Voluntary pension and life insurance29.5% · EA 18.3%
Other financial assets8.8% · EA 9.8%
Shares of the total financial assets held by households in Ireland. Where the survey published no figure, the item is left out rather than drawn as zero.
The other half
What happens when you put the house back in.
Financial assets are 14.9% of everything households in Ireland own. The other 85.1% is real: property above all, plus vehicles, valuables and business equity. Across the euro area the financial share is 20.7%. This is the number behind the question in the title, and for most households it means the majority of their wealth cannot be spent without selling where they live.
Financial
14.9%
Everything on this page, as a share of total household assets in Ireland.
Real
85.1%
Property, vehicles, valuables and business equity in Ireland, none of which a monthly statement tracks.
Euro area, financial
20.7%
The euro-area financial share is 20.7%, against 14.9% in Ireland.
Three numbers and an outlier
What these numbers look like from the outside.
Households owning mutual funds
4.8%, the lowest of the 10 countries here
4.8% of households in Ireland hold mutual funds. Funds are the usual route into markets for households that do not pick shares, so this rate says more about how invested a country is than any single balance does.
Households with any financial assets
98.1%
Every percentile on this page is measured among these households. The remaining 1.9% in Ireland hold nothing at all, and the survey publishes no distribution for them.
Own listed shares directly
11.8%
Against 11.4% across the euro area. Another 4.8% of households in Ireland hold mutual funds, which is the other way into the same markets.
Financial wealth held in deposits
40.7%
Against 44.1% across the euro area. Deposits are the safest place to keep money and the surest way to lose its purchasing power slowly.
Now put the house back in
Property, vehicles and business equity are the other 85.1% of what households own. See where your whole balance sheet lands.
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The cash half is the half that does not compound
40.7% of financial wealth in Ireland sits in deposits, against 44.1% across the euro area. Deposits keep their number and lose purchasing power slowly; funds and shares are where the larger balances on this page come from. Capital at risk.
We've used this for years
Being above the €15,900 median in this data is a lower bar than it sounds. The number that matters now is your own, tracked over time.
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Frequently asked questions
Among the 98.1% of households in Ireland that hold any financial asset, the median is €15,900 and the mean is €83,300, 5.2 times higher (ECB HFCS Wave 2023, Table C3). The mean is the wrong number to measure yourself against: a small number of large portfolios lifts it, while the median describes the household in the middle. The euro-area median is €16,600. The Irish mean is 5.2 times the median, the second-widest gap of the ten euro-area countries covered here, behind Italy.
€198,500 (ECB HFCS Wave 2023, Table C3). That is the ninetieth percentile among households holding any financial asset, and it is the highest threshold the survey publishes: there is no top 5% or top 1% figure in these tables, so any such number quoted for this survey has been extrapolated by someone rather than measured. At the other end, a tenth of holders have €600 or less.
11.8% own listed shares directly and 4.8% hold mutual funds (Table C1), against 11.4% and 14.2% across the euro area. Deposits, by contrast, are held by 98.0% of households. The dividing line in this data is not who saves but who invests, and it falls in very different places from one country to the next.
€50,000 places a household above about 70% of the households in Ireland that hold any financial asset. It is 3.1 times the median of €15,900, and still below the top-tenth threshold of €198,500. Both comparisons are worth holding at once: the multiple sounds large because the median is low, not because the amount is high.
40.7% of financial wealth in Ireland sits in deposits, 9.0% in mutual funds, 9.0% in listed shares and 29.5% in voluntary pension plans and life insurance (Table D3). The euro-area split is 44.1% deposits and 18.3% pensions. The pension and life-insurance share of 29.5% is the second highest of the seven countries here where that figure is comparable, and pension values in Ireland come from registers rather than survey answers (note IE2).
85.1% of everything households in Ireland own is a real asset: property above all, plus vehicles, valuables and business equity. Only 14.9% is financial (Table D1), against 20.7% across the euro area. That is the answer to the question this page asks. Take the house out and most balance sheets shrink to a fraction of their headline size, which is why a net-worth figure and a savings figure feel like they describe two different households.
Deposits in current and savings accounts, mutual funds, bonds, listed shares held directly, money owed to the household by people outside it, voluntary pension plans and whole life insurance, and other financial assets such as managed accounts. It excludes the main residence and any other property, vehicles, valuables and business equity, and it excludes entitlements from state and workplace pension schemes, which for a typical employee are worth more than everything on this list combined.
Among the households that hold them, the median mutual-fund holding in Ireland is €49,200, the median direct shareholding is €8,200 and the median voluntary pension or life insurance is €33,600 (Table C2). These are medians among owners, not among all households, so a large figure here says nothing about how common the asset is: 4.8% hold funds and 11.8% hold shares.
Three reasons, all visible in the same tables. The distribution is already conditional on holding something, so it excludes the 1.9% of households in Ireland with no financial asset at all. 40.7% of what is held sits in deposits rather than in assets that grow. And financial assets are 14.9% of household wealth here, against 20.7% across the euro area. That is the second-smallest financial share of the ten countries covered here, and 67.9% of Irish households own their main residence.
Only 4.8% do, the lowest rate of the ten countries here and a third of the euro-area 14.2% (ECB HFCS Wave 2023, Table C1). The households that do hold them are not holding small amounts: their median fund holding is €49,200, the largest of the ten (Table C2). Ireland is also the country here where direct bond ownership is most common, at 9.9% against a euro-area 3.5%. Fund ownership is narrow and concentrated rather than absent.
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