Somewhere in most accountants' client files there is a retired parent quietly moving money to their children, and until this week there was no good way to say how common that had become. Quilter's second annual Retirement Lifestyle Report, based on a survey of 5,002 UK retirees with analysis from the Centre for Economics and Business Research, puts a number on it: gifting to family and supporting grandchildren's education now accounts for 17% of the average retiree's annual spending, ahead of their grocery bill. That is not a niche estate-planning event any more. It is routine, ongoing spending, running through the same bank statements an accountant already reviews.
The figure that matters most in the report, though, is not the size of the gifting. It is who is doing it thoughtfully and who is doing it blind. Among retirees who say the current political environment is affecting their inheritance tax planning, 63% have received financial advice - against just 8% of those who never have. That is the advice gap made visible in a single client behaviour: not "do you have a pension" but "are you managing what you give away while you are still alive to see it matter." For the accountant who already sees the gifting on the statements, this is the week that behaviour got a name and a number attached to it.
What Quilter's research actually found
The average retiree now gives £2,272 a year to relatives and spends a further £2,250 on education costs for children and grandchildren - together £4,522 a year, and enough to push family support ahead of groceries (£2,110) in the ranking of retiree outgoings. Holidays remain the single largest line at £2,973, followed by home improvements at £2,776, but the report's authors flag family support specifically because of its scale and its direction of travel: total average retiree spending rose to £27,159 this year, up roughly £5,000 on last year's figure, and equivalent to around £368.7bn spent by the UK's retired population as a whole. Gifting, education support, charitable giving, holidays and home improvements between them account for 94% of that year-on-year increase.
Quilter's chief executive, Steven Levin, described retirement as "increasingly becoming a balancing act between meeting your own needs and supporting the people who matter most to you." That balancing act is not comfortable for everyone doing it: 60% of retirees surveyed remain concerned about maintaining their current standard of living over the next year, and average retirement income rose by just 1.2% over the same period - well below inflation. Retirees are, in other words, giving away meaningfully more while feeling meaningfully less secure about their own position, which is precisely the combination that makes a proper review worth having rather than optional.
The 63% gap
The report's most striking finding sits in how retirees are responding to policy change, not in how much they are spending. Overall, 39% of retirees say the current political environment is affecting their inheritance tax planning. Split that figure by whether someone has ever received financial advice and the picture changes completely: 63% of advised retirees say so, compared with just 8% of those who have never sought advice. Among the group who say they are affected, very few are simply freezing - just 5% report taking no action at all, down sharply from 38% a year ago. The rest are moving: 33% are looking for more tax-efficient ways to save, 27% are considering moving abroad, 27% are using trusts, 26% are putting assets into relatives' names, and 26% are gifting more to family and friends outright.
Thirty-nine per cent of retirees say policy is changing how they plan for inheritance tax. Whether that response is considered or panicked depends almost entirely on whether anyone is advising them.
That is the practical shape of the advice gap the lang cat's State of Advice Report 2025 already describes at the population level - only 9% of UK adults paid for financial advice in the preceding two years, against sub-5,000 IFA firms operating nationally. Quilter's data shows the same 90-odd per cent majority is not sitting this out. They are moving assets into trusts, gifting to relatives, and considering emigration, mostly without anyone checking whether the seven-year rule, the normal-expenditure-out-of-income exemption, or a simple change to their own spending would achieve more with less risk.
Why April 2027 is already changing behaviour
The specific policy driving much of this is the planned inclusion of unused pension funds within the estate for inheritance tax purposes from 6 April 2027 - a change we set out in detail, including the reliefs that stop applying at that boundary, in When the Pension Joins the Estate. Quilter's survey shows the change reshaping decisions well ahead of its start date. More than a quarter of retirees, 29%, now plan to spend more of their pension savings during their own lifetime rather than preserve it for beneficiaries. A further 26% intend to gift more of their pension wealth away, and 24% expect to access their pension earlier than they had originally planned. Each of those choices is individually reasonable. Taken together, and taken without a review of how they interact with income needs, care costs and the client's own longevity, they are also exactly the kind of decision that is easy to make quickly and hard to reverse.
The report's clearest illustration of that risk is not about pensions directly. It is about what happened the last time a Budget approached: 57% of retirees withdrew tax-free cash from their pension ahead of the last Budget, including 42% who said explicitly they did so in anticipation of rule changes that had not yet been confirmed. More than three in five of that group - 62% - came to regret doing so. We wrote about the mechanics of that specific rush, and AJ Bell's warning that speculation itself was pushing clients into decisions they could not undo, in The Pre-Budget Question. Quilter's new figures are the follow-up evidence: the rush happened, and most of the people who joined it now wish they hadn't.
The signal in the accounts
None of this requires an accountant to go looking for it specially. It shows up in the ordinary course of preparing a personal tax return or reviewing a client's bank statements for a self-assessment file: a retired client who has started making regular transfers to an adult child, a lump sum that left a pension account shortly before a Budget, a query about how gifts interact with the seven-year rule that the client half-remembers from somewhere. Any one of those, seen once, might be nothing. Set against a report showing 92% of retirees who behave this way have never had a financial review, it is worth a single factual question rather than simply processing the transaction.
The client most likely to be affected by this specific finding is not necessarily the wealthiest one on the books. Someone with a modest but genuinely surplus pension pot, gifting steadily to grandchildren because it feels prudent rather than because anyone has modelled it, is exactly the retiree Quilter's data describes - and exactly the client an accountant is more likely to see regularly than a financial planner is, because the accountant is doing an annual return regardless of portfolio size. We mapped the wider set of client-file triggers worth watching for in Signals in the Accounts.
What a joined-up conversation looks like
The useful move is not to hand a client a name or a recommendation. It is to establish the facts: has the gifting or the drawdown decision been thought through against the client's own future income and care needs, and does the client understand which reliefs and exemptions actually apply to what they are doing. Most retirees making these decisions have never been asked that directly, because the decision sits between two professions rather than cleanly inside either one - the accountant sees the transaction, the financial planner would ordinarily model its consequences, and unless the two are in contact, nobody does both.
Where an accountant and a client's existing financial planner are already in touch, that conversation is usually a short one: a shared view of the client's cashflow and the planner's modelling of what continued gifting at the current rate implies for later years. Where a client has no planner at all - the 92% majority this report describes - the accountant's role is simply to ask the question and let the client decide what, if anything, to do about the answer, in the same way a joined-up working relationship between the two professions is meant to work in practice: the accountant keeps doing the numbers and the tax, a regulated adviser handles the modelling and the recommendation, and the client is the one who chooses.
Two things worth doing this week
1. Add a gifting question to the next review with an older client. "Are you giving money away regularly, and has anyone modelled what that means for your own position later on?" takes ten seconds to ask and, per this data, is a question 92% of retirees have never had put to them by anyone. It requires no judgement about whether the client should stop - only whether they have actually thought it through.
2. Flag pre-Budget withdrawals as a pattern, not a one-off. With the Autumn Budget on 28 October 2026 approaching, any client mentioning they are drawing tax-free cash "just in case" is repeating exactly the behaviour 62% of last year's early withdrawers went on to regret. Noting it now, and asking what specifically they are trying to get ahead of, costs nothing and may save a client from an irreversible decision made on a rumour.
What is still uncertain
The pension inheritance tax change itself is confirmed policy, due to take effect from 6 April 2027, but the Autumn Budget on 28 October 2026 has not yet happened, and it is the most immediate source of the "political environment" Quilter's retirees say they are already reacting to. Whatever it contains - further detail on the 2027 pension change, adjustments to gifting or trust rules, or nothing on this front at all - will only be known on the day. Quilter's report is a snapshot of stated intentions and recent behaviour from a single survey wave rather than a tracking study, so it cannot say how many of the retirees currently planning to gift more, use trusts, or emigrate will actually follow through once the Budget detail is public. The report is produced annually rather than to match the Budget calendar, so the next comparable figures are not due until next year's edition.
Common questions
What did Quilter's Retirement Lifestyle Report actually find?
Quilter's second annual Retirement Lifestyle Report, based on a survey of 5,002 UK retirees with analysis from the Centre for Economics and Business Research and published 17 September 2026, found that gifting to family and supporting education costs for children and grandchildren now accounts for 17% of average retiree spending. The average retiree gives £2,272 a year to relatives and spends a further £2,250 on education support, together £4,522 a year - ahead of groceries at £2,110. Average annual retiree spending rose to £27,159, up £5,000 on the previous year and equivalent to roughly £368.7bn across the UK's retired population, with 60% of retirees still concerned about maintaining their standard of living.
Why does it matter that advised retirees are far more likely to be adjusting their inheritance tax planning than the unadvised?
Quilter's research found that 39% of retirees overall say the current political environment is affecting their inheritance tax planning, but that figure splits sharply by advice status: 63% of retirees who have received financial advice say so, against just 8% of those who have never sought advice. That is not a small gap in enthusiasm - it is most of a client base making no adjustment at all to decisions that, once made, are very hard to unwind. For an accountant, it means the least protected client in this data is not the one without assets, but the one without a financial planner reviewing what they do with them.
What is the April 2027 pension inheritance tax change and how is it already changing retiree behaviour?
From 6 April 2027, unused pension funds are due to be brought within the estate for inheritance tax purposes for the first time, removing a relief that has shaped retirement planning for two decades. Quilter's data shows the change is already altering behaviour well ahead of that date: 29% of retirees plan to spend more of their pension savings during their lifetime, 26% intend to gift more of their pension wealth, and 24% expect to access their pension earlier than originally planned. Among retirees who say the political environment is affecting their inheritance tax planning, 33% are looking for more tax-efficient ways to save, 27% are using trusts, and 26% are putting assets into relatives' names.
What should an accountant do if a client mentions gifting money or drawing a pension lump sum early?
Treat it as a planning event worth a question, not just a transaction to record. Ask what it is for, whether it is intended to use the seven-year gifting rules or the normal-expenditure-out-of-income exemption, and whether the client has thought about what happens if their own circumstances change afterwards. None of that requires giving regulated advice - it is the same noticing an accountant already applies to a large dividend or a director's loan. Quilter's finding that 62% of retirees who withdrew pension tax-free cash ahead of the last Budget came to regret it is the concrete reason that single question is worth asking before the transaction, not after.
Is this the same advice gap the lang cat has written about?
It is the same shortage seen from a different angle. The lang cat's State of Advice Report 2025 found that only 9% of UK adults had paid for financial advice in the preceding two years, against sub-5,000 IFA firms nationally - a gap usually framed as people who never engaged an adviser at all. Quilter's data shows the same divide playing out inside a group that has already retired and is already making irreversible decisions about gifting, drawdown and inheritance tax: the 92% majority without a financial planner are eight times less likely to be adjusting their plans in response to a known, dated policy change than the minority who have one.