Target-Date Assets Grew 21% in 2025

Assets in U.S. mutual fund and collective investment trust target-date series grew 21% in 2025, reaching $4.8 trillion, Sway Research LLC revealed Tuesday. Custom target-date strategies held an additional $371 billion, bringing the total target-date market to $5.2 trillion at year-end 2025.

According to the report, “The State of the Target-Date Market: Year-End 2025,” assets in target-date funds with embedded income features totaled $139 billion at the close of 2025, up from $100 billion at the outset of the year. Sway’s mid-year report, published in September 2025, showed that TDF hit $103 billion on June 30, 2025, up from $83 billion at the end of 2024.

The providers with the most total assets under management in TDFs were Vanguard ($1.79 trillion); Fidelity Investments ($693 billion); and BlackRock ($611 billion). Great Gray Trust Co., which purchased the sub-advisory business of flexPath Strategies in 2025, was the fastest-growing provider of those, with more than $1 billion in assets, gaining 74% year-over-year and finishing 2025 with $88 billion in TDF AUM.

Of the 17 income-embedded TDFs Sway tracked last year, TIAA’s offering led the pack, measured by assets. The firm’s RetirePlus model portfolio held $72 billion as of year-end 2025, up from $60 billion at mid-year 2025 and $50 billion at the end of 2024.

“Within the next decade, it will seem as strange for a retirement plan to lack guaranteed income options as it would today for a plan to operate without target-date funds,” said , TIAA’s chief product officer, in a statement.

BlackRock’s LifePath Paycheck ($27 billion), State Street’s IncomeWise ($22 billion) and AllianceBernstein L.P.’s Lifetime Income Strategy ($14 billion) followed TIAA’s RetirePlus, according to the report. AB’s LifePath Paycheck gained 62% in AUM, the largest gain among income-embedded TDFs with at least $1 billion in AUM.

Last year, 20 TDF series were launched, bringing the total number of series Sway tracked to 164. Sway’s report noted that 11 of the new series were co-manufactured, by Ameritas Life Insurance Corp. (three), Manulife John Hancock Retirement (three), Principal Financial Group (two), the Empower Annuity Insurance Co. of America (one), The Standard Insurance Co. (one) and Voya Financial Inc. (one), respectively.

Co-manufacturing enables plan recordkeepers to manage the stable value, guaranteed income contracts or fixed-annuity allocation within the series, potentially offsetting administrative costs and thereby lowering the fees paid by plan participants.

At year-end 2025, there were 46 co-manufactured TDFs with $72 billion in AUM. Great Gray led all providers with $40 billion in co-manufactured TDF AUM across 18 series. Series from two of the largest target-date managers, BlackRock and Capital Group, were most used in co-manufactured series: 13 for BlackRock and 14 for Capital Group at the close of 2025.

“Smaller target-date managers that already had a difficult time competing for flows at leading [defined contribution] platforms, given the scale advantages held by market leaders, are now finding it even more difficult to compete with target-date solutions that are exclusive to large recordkeeping platforms and typically more cost-effective,” said Chris Brown, Sway’s founder, in a statement.

The biannual report is based on a proprietary database of mutual fund CIT and target-date portfolio and asset data, which includes 164 target-date solutions that held assets at the end of 2025 across nearly 7,000 mutual fund share classes and CITs, according to Sway.