How many Mondays until you retire?

Whether you love or loathe your job, after a good weekend Monday mornings can be a thorn in the side and are often the part of the week that people look forward to least. At Bestinvest we’re all about helping people take control of their futures so we thought it would be interesting to look into how many Mondays people have until they’re eligible to receive their State pension. We also wanted to find out who suffers the Monday blues and how they cope with them. We then show you how you can take control of your own retirement – so if you don’t like the prospect of working another 1,000 Monday mornings, you may not have to.

Written by Lee Dooley

Published on 26 Oct 20172 minute read

How many Mondays?

We looked at the number of Mondays that a typical UK resident needs to work through before reaching their State pension age. When added up, the numbers are quite staggering. For a 50-year-old the figure was 748, growing to 1,232 for a 40-year-old and 1,672 for a 30-year-old.

20-year-olds need to work through a huge 2,112 Mondays – or the equivalent of 6 years’ worth! This is great news if you love your job, but a worrying prospect for those who are less enthusiastic about going into work on a Monday morning!

When do we start thinking about Monday?

But regardless of how we feel about our jobs, when does our attention actually turn to the approaching Monday morning? Our research showed that for typical UK workers, the weekend ends (and thoughts turn to work) at 16:22 on Sunday afternoon.

We also wanted to know which industries or professions suffered the worst Monday blues – and which ones felt more positively towards the upcoming working week. The top of the list for Monday blues were accountancy and banking employees – 83% of respondents said they found it difficult to pull themselves out of bed on a Monday morning.

At the other end of the scale, workers from the leisure, sport and tourism industry were most positive about Mondays – only 50% of them said they dreaded Monday mornings.

How do people cope with the Monday blues?

For those people who are least inspired about going to work on Monday, we wanted to know how they offset thoughts of Monday Morning and ensure that their weekend enjoyment lasts a little longer. According to our research, they do this by watching a film, planning for the following weekend and relaxing with a cup of tea.

Plan your own future

At Bestinvest we are firm believers in taking control of your own retirement. It can be daunting to see how many Mondays the average person will work through before retiring, but we believe that with proper planning and the right pension, you can stop working when you want to and enjoy the retirement lifestyle that you want and deserve.

Many of our clients save for retirement with our award-winning low-cost Best SIPP. The Best SIPP gives you more control over your pension – it’s easy to review and manage your investments, you can check the value of your pension online around the clock, and you get access to all our latest investment research.

Our research methodology

To find out how many Mondays people must work before retiring, we first found out how many years people of varying ages would need to work before receiving their State pension*. For consistency, we used the same birthday for every age.

Next, we calculated how many Mondays an average person will work in a year. We needed to subtract the four UK bank holidays that fall on Mondays, and the Mondays that would fall during the four weeks’ annual leave workers are entitled to each year. We could then multiply the remaining number of Mondays by the number of years until retirement, to give us the total number of Mondays left until retirement for workers of a given age.

We also conducted secondary research through public surveys to see how Mondays affected UK employees. We asked workers from 10 different job sectors about their attitudes towards Mondays. The sectors were: