CalSavers: $1.34 Billion In, One in Three Opts Out
Summary
California auto-enrolls any worker whose employer skips a retirement plan into a state-run IRA. As of June 30, 2025 the program held $1.34 billion across 562,147 funded accounts — but 35.07% of enrollees opt out, and per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 59% of workers at firms under 100 employees have retirement-plan access through their job at all.
Where the $1.34 billion sits
Total assets are the headline the program leads with, but the average funded account holds $2,387 and the median holds just $632 — a gap that means the fund's size is driven by a relatively small number of larger, longer-tenured balances sitting on top of a much larger base of small ones. Nearly half of all funded accounts hold $500 or less.
View data as table
| $0.01 – $500 | 256,184 | 45.6% |
|---|---|---|
| $500.01 – $1,000 | 73,996 | 13.2% |
| $1,000.01 – $2,000 | 70,906 | 12.6% |
| $2,000.01 – $5,000 | 80,237 | 14.3% |
| $5,000.01 – $10,000 | 47,296 | 8.4% |
| $10,000.01+ | 33,528 | 6.0% |
| Total funded accounts | 562,147 | 100% |
That skew is structural, not a sign of neglect: the program only reached full statewide scope for employers with 5 to 100 workers in the last two of its registration waves, so a large share of accounts are new and have had only months of 5%-of-pay contributions behind them. Cumulative contributions to date total $1,518,004,655 against $413,325,074 in cumulative withdrawals — workers who left a job, hit a hardship, or simply cashed out. The 24.22% withdrawal rate (accounts with a full withdrawal, as a share of accounts that ever made payroll contributions) means roughly one in four CalSavers savers who started contributing later took the money back out.
The opt-out is the second-biggest line item
CalSavers reports an "effective opt-out rate" of 35.07% as of June 30, 2025 — essentially unchanged from 35.39% three months earlier. That means more than a third of eligible workers who are automatically enrolled choose to leave the program, a rate the state treasurer's own reporting tracks quarter over quarter as a core performance metric, not a footnote. On the employer side, compliance lags further behind: of the 285,484 employers the state estimates are eligible for the program, only 20% have reached full payroll facilitation — actually remitting employee contributions on an ongoing basis.
View data as table
| Full payroll facilitation | 56,803 | 20% |
|---|---|---|
| Mid-onboarding | 74,281 | 26% |
| Exempt | 101,900 | 36% |
| No action taken | 42,177 | 15% |
| Registered only | 10,323 | 3% |
| Total eligible employers | 285,484 | 100% |
Thirty-six percent of eligible employers report themselves exempt — meaning they already sponsor a qualifying retirement plan of their own, which is the outcome the law is actually designed to produce. But 15%, 42,177 employers, have taken no action at all despite being past deadline, and another 3% registered without ever uploading the employee roster CalSavers needs to start deductions. Non-compliant employers are referred to the Franchise Tax Board, which issues a $250-per-employee penalty on the first notice and an additional $500 per employee if noncompliance continues 90 days past that — but the state treasurer's own snapshot doesn't report how many penalties have actually been assessed.
The gap the mandate was built to close
CalSavers exists because a large share of California's private-sector workforce has no employer-sponsored retirement plan to opt into in the first place — a pattern that isn't unique to California. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' National Compensation Survey found that in March 2025, retirement benefits were available to 72% of private-industry workers nationally — but access splits sharply by employer size.
View data as table
| Fewer than 100 workers | 59% |
|---|---|
| 100–499 workers | 86% |
| 500+ workers | 90% |
Only 59% of workers at establishments with fewer than 100 workers have access to a retirement plan through their job, against 90% at firms with 500 or more workers. That 31-point gap is precisely the population California's law targets: any employer with five or more employees that doesn't already sponsor a plan. CalSavers doesn't have to convert every one of those workers into a saver to matter — it has to give them an account that didn't exist before. On that narrower measure, it has already opened 562,147 of them.
The takeaway
- CalSavers has scaled past the pilot stage. $1.34 billion in assets and 562,147 funded accounts as of June 30, 2025, funded through automatic 5%-of-pay payroll deductions with no employer cost.
- Participation is thinner than enrollment. A 35.07% opt-out rate and a $632 median balance mean the program's size comes from breadth, not depth — most accounts are small, and a third of enrollees leave.
- Employer compliance trails the law. Only 20% of the state's 285,484 estimated eligible employers have reached full payroll facilitation; 15% have taken no action despite passing their registration deadline.
- The gap CalSavers targets is national, not just Californian. data puts retirement-plan access at just 59% for workers at firms under 100 employees — the exact population the mandate is built around.
Figures are drawn from the California State Treasurer's Office's most recent published CalSavers participation snapshot (June 30, 2025) and the National Compensation Survey's March 2025 reference period; both predate this article's publication date, and neither office had published a more current comparable snapshot as of this writing.
Sources
- California State Treasurer's Office, CalSavers Retirement Savings Board, Participation & Funding Snapshot, June 2025 — the state's own quarterly report on assets, funded accounts, opt-out rate, contribution and withdrawal totals, account-balance distribution, and employer compliance status. treasurer.ca.gov
- CalSavers, About the Program — the program's own description of employer eligibility, the default 5% contribution rate, the opt-out mechanism, and employer obligations under California law. calsavers.com
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employee Benefits in the United States, March 2025 (USDL-25-1464, released September 25, 2025) — national retirement-benefit access rates by employer establishment size, the independent federal benchmark for the coverage gap CalSavers targets. bls.gov
- California Franchise Tax Board, Collections for CalSavers Retirement Savings Program — the penalty structure and process for non-compliant employers ($250 per employee on first notice, $500 more after 90 days of continued noncompliance). ftb.ca.gov
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California doesn't require employers to offer a retirement plan. It requires them to offer something — either their own plan, or CalSavers, a state-run Roth-style IRA into which every employee is automatically enrolled at a default 5% of pay, unless the worker opts out. No employer match, no employer fee, no employer fiduciary liability — the account belongs to the worker, who can raise, lower, or zero out the contribution at any time. The state's final registration wave, covering employers with five or more employees, hit its deadline on December 31, 2025. By the California State Treasurer's Office's own June 30, 2025 snapshot — the most recent full participation report published before that deadline — the program had already scaled to nine figures.