The research is growing, but it remains fragmented. These institutions are not necessarily studying the same people. Some are looking at single adults. Others are studying single women, people living alone, divorced women, female investors or women who control household wealth. These groups overlap, but they are not interchangeable. This issue brings that emerging research into one place. It asks what institutions have started to notice, what they are measuring, what their findings tell us and which parts of single women’s economic lives remain unseen.
So, what does the research landscape currently look like? Different sectors are beginning to notice single adults and single women for different reasons and each institution tends to see the part of a woman’s economic life that sits closest to its own work.
A pension provider sees the cost of retiring on one income.
A housing company sees a growing group of homeowners.
A wealth manager sees a changing customer base.
A government agency sees a shift in how people live. Each of these perspectives is useful.
Below, I’m sharing some of the key sectors where publicly available research and data are beginning to reveal different parts of the Single Woman Economy.
The retirement sector is producing some of the clearest evidence of what happens when living costs cannot be shared. In 2025, Standard Life compared the savings needed by single and partnered pensioners to reach the same standard of living in retirement. Its analysis estimated that a single person would need a pension pot of around £439,000 to achieve a “moderate” retirement. For a couple, the estimated amount was £428,000 between them, or £214,000 each. That is a difference of £225,000 per person.
The calculation is an illustration rather than a prediction of what every retiree will need. It relies on specific assumptions about State Pension entitlement, annuity rates, tax and retirement age. But it makes the underlying problem unusually easy to see: two people can share housing, utilities and many everyday costs. A person funding retirement alone cannot. The pension industry is not necessarily examining the whole Single Woman Economy here. In this case, Standard Life studied single pensioners of both sexes. But it is measuring one of its central economic realities: the amount an individual may need changes when the financial contribution of another adult cannot be assumed.
The housing sector sees something different. In the US, First American reported that more than 20 million single women owned homes in 2025, the highest number it had recorded. The homeownership rate among single women fell slightly, however, because the number of single woman households grew faster than the number becoming homeowners. That distinction matters. More single women can own homes at the same time as homeownership becomes harder for the group overall.
First American includes never married, divorced, separated and widowed women within its definition of a “single-woman household.” It is therefore capturing several very different routes into sole homeownership. What makes these women visible to the housing sector is not simply their relationship status. It is their growing presence as household heads, borrowers and property owners. They are buying homes, building equity and making housing decisions without a second buyer necessarily appearing on the application.
Some banks are looking more directly at singledom itself. In 2026, Ally Bank surveyed nearly 2,000 single and partnered adults in the US. Its research examined both the financial pressures and the perceived freedoms of being single. The findings did not present single life only as a disadvantage. Single respondents were more likely to prioritise goals such as increasing their income or paying for their own education. But only 34% said they felt confident that they could build long term wealth while single. This is a slightly different kind of institutional interest. Ally is not only counting single customers. It is trying to understand how their goals, pressures and attitudes towards money may differ from those of people in couples.
There is an obvious commercial reason for a bank to understand this group. But there is also a useful signal here: “single” is beginning to be treated as a financial context that may shape what people need, rather than a temporary personal detail with little relevance to financial services.
The wealth-management sector is approaching the issue through another doorway: the growing amount of wealth controlled by women. In 2025, McKinsey surveyed more than 13,000 investors across the US and Europe. Its analysis estimated that women controlled roughly one-third of retail financial assets across the US and European Union, with that share expected to reach between 40% and 45% by 2030.
McKinsey identified falling marriage rates and persistently high divorce rates as part of this shift. In Europe, it found that the share of financially independent single women increased from 27% in 2018 to 29% in 2023. Its interest is explicitly commercial. Wealth managers want to attract and retain more of the assets women control. The research focuses heavily on affluent investors, and much of its analysis concerns women more broadly rather than single women alone. Still, it tells us something important. Single women become more visible to financial institutions when they control enough wealth to represent a clear growth market.
Other research focuses on the point at which a woman moves from a shared household into a single economic life. Legal & General’s 2025 Divorce Gap research examined the financial effects of divorce in the UK. It found that women’s household income fell by an average of 50% in the year after divorce, compared with a 30% decline for men. This research makes divorced women visible because divorce creates an event that institutions can identify and measure. There is a before and an after. Income changes, assets are divided and one household becomes two. But this also reveals a wider gap in the landscape. The economic lives of women who become single through divorce are studied more often than the lives of women who have never married. Divorce produces a measurable financial disruption. Lifelong singlehood unfolds over decades, without one event telling researchers when to start looking.
Government data gives us the size and shape of changing households. The Office for National Statistics recorded 8.6 million people living alone in the UK in 2025. One person households accounted for 29.5% of all UK households. But living alone is not the same as being single. A person can be unmarried and live with relatives, friends or children. Someone can also live alone while remaining legally married or in a relationship. Official household data helps us see the scale of solo living, but it cannot tell us everything about the financial position of single women.
Academic research is beginning to ask a different question: what happens when public systems themselves are built around marriage? A 2025 study highlighted by the University of Michigan examined how US Social Security rules affect lifelong single, divorced and widowed women. It found that married older adults had higher Social Security benefits and household incomes, as well as lower poverty rates. The study is important because it moves the focus away from personal financial choices and towards institutional design. It asks whether rules created around marriage and spousal benefits produce different outcomes for people whose lives do not follow that model. Its sample was limited to more than 5,200 white high school graduates from Wisconsin, so its findings should not automatically be applied to all women in the US. The researchers themselves identified the need to examine whether the same patterns hold for Black and Hispanic women.
The available research gives us important pieces of the picture, but rarely connects them. Although some of the sector specific data eventually finds single women through the questions that matter to them, the problem is that single women do not experience their economic lives one sector at a time. We can see individual consequences of building a financial life without a partner. What we still lack is a joined up view of their cumulative effect across a single woman’s life.
The biggest gap is also that “single women” are still often treated as one group. We know far less about never married women and how race, class, disability, sexuality and geography shape single women’s financial lives. We also lack research that follows women over time and measures the cumulative cost of relying on one income across housing, care, wealth building and retirement.
Much of the existing research asks whether women feel financially confident. Far less asks whether financial products, workplace benefits and public policy were designed for lives like theirs. It also tends to overlook informal support networks, care outside the spouse and children model, and women who have partners but remain solely responsible for their own financial security.
This is where I see the opportunity. It begins with better research: tracking both quantitative data and qualitative insight to understand how single women earn, spend, save, borrow, invest and plan for the future. This is a growing economic segment and not temporary, and it should already be on the radar of institutions, organisations and brands.
An institution can recognise women as an important customer group while still failing to understand how their financial needs change when marriage, shared income and spousal support cannot be assumed. “Women” is not always a detailed enough category. An ‘independent’ woman sharing costs and financial risk with a partner may be in a very different position from a woman managing housing, care, insurance, emergencies and retirement on one income.
Without that distinction, institutions risk:
Using customer segments that hide important differences between single and partnered women
Designing products, financial advice and retirement services around shared household resources
Misreading single-income customers through lending, insurance and risk models
Offering workplace benefits that assume employees can rely on a spouse or family structure
Marketing to women without reflecting how many actually organise their financial lives
Developing public policy around household models that describe a shrinking share of the population
The commercial opportunity is not simply that single women have spending power. It is that many organisations may still be making decisions based on household models that no longer describe a growing share of their customers, employees and communities.
The institutions that begin tracking this shift now will be better placed to identify unmet needs, question outdated assumptions and design products and services that reflect how people actually live. The Single Woman Economy is already here. The strategic question is which institutions will understand it early enough to respond.
This issue establishes an early baseline. From here, the Desk will continue tracking how the research develops, which institutions are producing it and whether better evidence begins to change products, policies and business decisions.
In particular, we will be watching:
Whether research moves beyond women’s financial confidence to examine the systems and structures shaping their choices
Whether institutions begin connecting evidence across housing, work, wealth, care, retirement and public policy
Whether findings lead to changes in products, services, workplace benefits and customer strategy
Whether single women become understood as a distinct economic constituency, rather than a collection of isolated customer problems
This Desk will develop across three connected strands:
Single Woman Economy: The Data - what is structurally changing. This strand will track the demographic, economic and institutional evidence. It will examine what is changing, who is measuring it and what the available data allows us to say.
Single Woman Economy: The Money - how women finance independent adulthood. This strand will examine how single women earn, spend, save, borrow, invest, manage risk and prepare for later life when a partner’s income or financial support cannot be assumed.
Single Woman Economy: The Lives - case studies of how actual single women have built their economic architecture. The data can show us the scale of the shift, but it cannot tell us everything about how single women experience it. This strand will bring in single women’s real lives: the decisions they make, the systems they build and the forms of support, security and resilience that may not appear in institutional datasets.
Together, these three strands will help the Desk connect structural change, financial behaviour and lived experience. They will also give institutions a fuller view of the customers, employees and communities behind the numbers.
For this issue, I reviewed and brought together findings from 15 recent reports, datasets and pieces of institutional research. If you would like the complete source list, leave a comment or send me a message and I’ll happily share it with you.
The Single Woman Economy Desk is a weekly market intelligence publication exploring how demographic change is reshaping consumer markets, workplaces and institutions. Each week, I examine one question through the lens of evidence, commercial strategy and institutional design, looking beyond headlines to understand what organisations should be paying attention to next.
Once a month, the Desk publishes a longer Market Intelligence Edition, taking a deeper look at a single industry. Last month’s edition examined the travel sector and asked what every industry could learn from the first market to recognise the economically independent single woman as a primary customer.
Ashanti Bentil-Dhue | Single Woman Correspondent
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