Dimension: Pension Replacement Rate

Table, not chart — the underlying metric isn't measured the same way across all five countries, so forcing it onto one bar-chart scale would imply a false comparability. See "How This Page Was Built" for the rule this follows.

Country	Figure	Basis	Source
Germany	53.3% net (mandatory only) → 68.0% net (with voluntary)	Net replacement rate — pension as % of prior net earnings, full-career average earner from age 22	OECD, Pensions at a Glance 2025, Germany country note
US	39% gross (Social Security only)	Gross replacement rate — % of prior gross earnings, average full-career earner	Wharton Pension Research Council, citing OECD model output, 2023
Italy	"70% or more" gross (mandatory)	Same gross basis, OECD's headline ranking — Italy is grouped in an open-ended bucket with 10 other countries, no exact point published	OECD, Pensions at a Glance 2025
Greece	"70% or more" gross and "85% or more" net (mandatory)	Greece is the only one of our five in both open-ended buckets — still bucketed, not exact	OECD, Pensions at a Glance 2025
UK	Not applicable in this unit	The flat-rate State Pension (£12,547.60/yr, 2026-27) pays the same amount regardless of prior earnings — "replacement rate" doesn't mean anything for a system not designed to be earnings-linked	Structural fact about UK system design, not a data gap

What this table actually shows

Four different bases, not four points on one scale:

Germany and the US are not directly comparable as shown. Germany's number is net, the US's is gross, and net replacement rates run higher than gross ones — less tax and no social contributions apply to pension income the way they apply to wages. A true head-to-head would require the US's net figure specifically, which we did not find sourced to the standard we required elsewhere on this page.

Italy and Greece are bucketed, not pinpointed. "70% or more" tells you the direction — both have unusually generous public pensions by OECD standards — but not precisely where in that open-ended range each country sits.

The UK's number doesn't exist in this unit, which is itself the finding. The UK deliberately keeps its state pension flat and pushes earnings-replacement onto private and workplace pensions, while Germany, Italy, and Greece all attempt earnings-replacement through the public pillar.

The comparison the data actually supports isn't "which country replaces more of your income" — that ranked question isn't answerable at the confidence level this page requires everywhere else. What the sourced data does support: which countries rely on the public/mandatory pillar to do the earnings-replacement work, and which push that work onto voluntary or private pensions. Italy and Greece lean almost entirely on the public system. Germany explicitly designs its public pillar as partial and expects a voluntary top-up. The US's public pillar (Social Security) is even more partial than Germany's on a like-for-like gross basis. The UK doesn't attempt earnings-replacement through the state pension at all. That's a real, structural finding — a different claim than "Greece pays out more than the US," even though the raw bucket numbers might suggest that reading at a glance.

A high public-pension number sustained by a shrinking base of future taxpayers is not the same kind of number as one deliberately kept partial because the system assumes private savings will fill the gap. Both Italy and Greece are flagged by the OECD's own 2025 report as having among the fastest-declining working-age populations in the dataset — worth holding in mind alongside their high bucketed replacement rates.