A retirement portfolio glide path is the pre-set schedule that shifts a portfolio from mostly stocks to mostly bonds as a saver ages. Fund managers automate this inside target-date funds, cutting equity exposure gradually through the working years and continuing the shift for years after the stated retirement date. The exact shape of that path varies by provider, but the direction is the same everywhere: more stocks when there's time to recover from a downturn, more bonds and inflation protection when there isn't. The sections below walk through what a real glide path looks like, who ends up using one, and where the old shortcuts for setting one yourself fall short.
Table of Contents
- What a typical glide path looks like, start to finish
- Who actually ends up on one of these paths
- What's inside the fund, and what it costs
- Should the stock allocation keep rising even after retirement starts?
What a typical glide path looks like, start to finish
Vanguard's target-date glide path starts near 90% stocks around age 20, begins trimming equity around age 40, and adds inflation-protected Treasury (TIPS) exposure around age 60. It settles at a fixed 30% stocks/70% bonds mix in Vanguard's Target Retirement Income fund — the end point for investors already drawing down savings. That fixed landing point is what the industry calls a "to" glide path: allocation stops changing once retirement arrives. Not every provider builds it that way.
A 2024 CalSavers staff presentation comparing major providers found Fidelity's index target-date series held about 52% equities at the target retirement date but kept adjusting for roughly 17 more years, eventually landing near 19% equities — a "through" design that keeps de-risking well past the retirement date itself, according to the CalSavers comparison. Fidelity has also been revising its own path. Its Freedom Funds began a multiyear glide-path change effective around October 1, 2025, raising equity allocations by roughly 0.5 to 9 percentage points for both younger savers and those near or in retirement, while adding TIPS and commodities exposure closer to retirement, per fund disclosure data. The revision is scheduled to finish by around the first quarter of 2027.
Who actually ends up on one of these paths
Target-date funds are now the default way most workplace retirement savers get a glide path, rather than something they build themselves. Vanguard's "How America Saves 2026" report found 86% of its recordkept retirement plans offered target-date funds in 2025, and 84% of eligible participants used them when offered, according to Vanguard's participant data. The average plan's allocation to target-date funds climbed to 45% of assets, up from 42% the year before.
The scale behind that adoption is large. Morningstar's 2026 Target-Date Fund Landscape report put total U.S. target-date fund assets at about $4.8 trillion in 2025, up 20.3% from the prior year, with the five largest providers controlling 80% of that total and Vanguard alone holding 37% ($1.8 trillion), according to Morningstar's report. For most 401(k) and similar plan participants, picking a target-date fund with the right vintage year is effectively choosing a glide path off the shelf rather than designing one.
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What's inside the fund, and what it costs
A target-date fund isn't a single security — it's a wrapper holding other funds, and the vehicle used for that wrapper has shifted. The same Morningstar report found collective investment trusts held 54% of target-date assets at the end of 2025, up from 52% a year earlier, overtaking mutual funds as the leading structure.
Collective investment trusts are pooled vehicles available only inside employer retirement plans, not to retail brokerage accounts, which is part of why they carry lower costs than retail mutual funds. That cost difference shows up directly: the asset-weighted average expense ratio across target-date funds fell to 0.27% from 0.29%, per Morningstar's 2026 landscape report. On a $500,000 balance, that two-basis-point difference works out to about $100 a year — small on its own, but it compounds over decades inside a plan that may hold the fund for 40-plus years.
Should the stock allocation keep rising even after retirement starts?
The traditional shortcut for setting a stock allocation by hand is "100 minus age" — a rule tracing back to at least the 1950s, when U.S. life expectancy was about 68, according to justETF Academy's explanation. With life expectancy now closer to 77, critics argue the rule pushes older savers into bond-heavy portfolios too conservative to outpace inflation over a retirement that can easily run 25 or 30 years, which is why "110 minus age" and "120 minus age" variants have gained traction as alternatives.
Research on retirement-specific portfolios points in a similar direction. A 2013 study by Wade Pfau and Michael Kitces, published in the Journal of Financial Planning in January 2014, found that a "rising equity glide path" during retirement — starting around 20-40% stocks and increasing to 60-80% over the retirement years — reduced both the probability and the severity of running out of money compared with a flat or declining stock allocation, according to the Pfau-Kitces findings. That result runs counter to the instinct to keep cutting stock exposure as retirement progresses, and it's the main academic case for providers like Fidelity building "through" glide paths that keep some equity growth working well past the retirement date.
- Starting conservative and raising equity afterward can outperform a path that only ever gets more conservative, per the Pfau-Kitces research.
- A "to" fund (like Vanguard's) locks in its allocation at retirement; a "through" fund (like Fidelity's) keeps shifting for a decade or more afterward.
- Either design beats guessing: a fund's prospectus states its glide path and landing allocation in writing, which a hand-built "100 minus age" rule does not account for.
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