My boyfriend earns more but wants to split bills 50:50. How can I still save for my pension?

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Shares Magazine

10 September 2026

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Ask the experts. Sarah Coles is on hand to answer your personal finance questions. If you’d like a question considered for a future edition send it in now.

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My boyfriend earns much more than me and insists we pay 50:50 for household expenses, but I’m worried it doesn’t leave me with enough to pay into my pension. Is this fair? 

Sam

There’s no definitively correct way to manage money between you in any relationship, so what most couples aim for is something that feels fair to both of you. That doesn’t seem to be the case for you, so you have a few options.

The first step is to diagnose the problem, and for that you need to draw up a budget of your own costs. Include pension contributions, because these should be non-negotiable. Then add in your share of the bills and detail your other spending.

There’s a very rough rule of thumb that around 50%-60% of your spending should be on things you need – so the bills plus other essentials, then around 20% should go on savings, pensions and debt repayment, leaving you with around 20%-30% to spend on the rest. These figures will be different for everyone, but if they’re wildly different, you’ve identified the source of the problem.

What’s leaving you short for pension contributions?

If the reason you can’t put money aside for the future is that you’re spending a much larger percentage of your income on nice-to-haves, this should be the focus of cuts.

If you’re spending too much on the essentials, then you need to be paying less into joint expenses, and you need to talk to your partner about a better solution.

If your partner needs help to see why things need to change, it’s worth talking to him about how he wants your retirement to look – assuming you’re still together at that point. If he expects you to continue to pay for 50% of the outgoings, you need the opportunity to build a pension of your own so you can afford it.

If he is happy paying for the lion’s share of these expenses in retirement, then why not now? And even if you’re convinced he would pick up more of the expenses later in life, you need to be aware of the risk you’re taking, because if you were to split up before retirement, without getting married, you would have no right to his pension.

If you agree that things need to change, you have two options. You can propose that you both contribute proportionally towards the essentials instead, so if 75% of the household income is earned by one person, they cover 75% of the joint household expenses. This is a very common approach. If your partner isn’t happy that this is robust, you can go into more detail. He can also draw up a budget, and you can set up your contributions so you’re both spending the same percentage of your income on the essentials.

If he is fundamentally uncomfortable with putting more into joint expenses, the alternative is that you both pay less into this account, so you’re paying at a level you can afford, and then trim down the cost of the essentials. You can downsize where you live, cancel media packages, trade down at the supermarket and tighten your belt. That way you can both afford to split expenses 50:50, without compromising your long-term security.

If your partner wants to boost their lifestyle beyond this level, they can do so with their own money. It’ll just be up to them whether they do it for both of you, or choose to spend it all on themselves.

Is it an emotional rather than a financial issue?

If, after all this, he still won’t consider a different division of expenses, it can help to ask him why 50:50 is so important to him, to see if this is an emotional problem rather than a financial one. It could be down to anything from not wanting the pressure of being responsible for more spending, to wanting to avoid making the same mistakes as his parents or being worried he couldn’t afford to keep up with the lifestyles of his friends if he covered more of the joint costs. You may be able to find a solution to the emotional problem that opens the door to a financial one.

None of this is easy, so you might be tempted to skip the whole conversation, carry on paying 50%, and put off thinking about your pension for another day. However, not only will this have a horrible impact at retirement, it’s also unsustainable. If you stay together, over the course of a lifetime, things will change. You could end up out-earning him or covering all the costs if he has to stop work.

Alternatively, it might be you who takes a break from work and him who needs to foot the bill. Rigidly sticking to 50:50 throughout all of this isn’t going to be workable, so you need to do the hard yards now and work out a solution that will stand you in good stead for whatever life throws at you.