Charted: The World’s 300 Largest Pension Funds

What are pension funds?

Pension funds are financial vehicles designed to ensure individuals have a stable and sufficient income after they retire from their careers. The primary purpose of pension funds is to accumulate and invest these contributions with the aim of generating returns that will fund retirees' future needs.

Managed by professional fund managers, pension funds invest in a diversified portfolio of assets, such as stocks, bonds, and real estate, to achieve long-term growth while managing risk. This investment strategy helps pension funds to not only preserve the value of the contributed funds but also potentially increase their value over time. Ultimately, pension funds play a crucial role in addressing the challenge of financial security in retirement, offering individuals a reliable source of income to maintain their quality of life once they have stopped working.

In this story, we use data from the Thinking Ahead Institute to explore the world’s 300 largest pension funds.

The world’s largest pension funds

The world’s 300 largest pension funds had USD $23.6 trillion in assets under management at the end of 2021. The Government Pension Investment Fund, a pension fund for public sector employees in Japan, holds the top spot as the world’s largest pension fund with more than USD $1.7 trillion in AUM. It’s a position the fund has held since 2002. Rounding out the top five are Government Pension Fund (Norway), National Pension (South Korea), Federal Retirement Thrift (USA), and APB (Netherlands) with $1.4 trillion, $797 billion, $774 billion, and $630 billion in AUM respectively. Data for US funds is as of September 31, 2021, and non-US funds is as of December 31, 2021. Below is the full list of the 300 largest pension funds from largest to smallest.

Types of funds covered in the rankings

The Thinking Ahead Institute report covers four different types of pension funds:

Sovereign pension funds: Investment funds that are controlled by the state. This ranking only includes funds that are established by national governments.

Public sector funds: Funds that cover public sector workers such as government employees and teachers, in provincial or state plans.

Private independent funds: Funds controlled by private sector organizations and authorized to manage pension plans from different employers.

Corporate funds: Funds that cover workers in company-sponsored pension plans.

Among the top 300 pension funds, public sector funds constitute the largest portion at 41%, followed by private independent funds at 32%, corporate funds at 19%, and sovereign pension funds at 8%. In terms of asset distribution, public sector funds lead with USD $9.53 trillion in assets under management (AUM), followed by sovereign funds with USD $6.94 trillion, and corporate and private independent funds with USD $3.91 trillion and USD $3.24 trillion in AUM respectively.

Share of the top 300 by country

The United States dominates the list and has almost half the funds in the ranking, with 148. After the United States, the countries with the largest number of pension funds in the ranking are the United Kingdom (23), Canada (18), Australia (15), the Netherlands (12), Switzerland (12) and Japan (11). Here’s a look at the breakdown by country.

Steady growth in assets under management

The world's top 300 pension funds experienced an 8.9% increase in assets under management (AUM) to reach a record high of USD $23.6 trillion in 2021. This growth, although slower than the 11.5% in 2020, has contributed to a five-year cumulative growth (CAGR) of 50.2% between 2016 and 2021.

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