Automatic enrollment does a good job getting employees into a defined contribution plan, but a new study argues that sponsors and advisors need to spend more time focusing on improving participants’ savings rates throughout their working years.

According to the latest installment of J.P. Morgan Asset Management’s “Ready! Fire! Aim?” research, which has examined the saving and withdrawal behaviors of defined contribution plan participants for more than a decade, automatic enrollment is only a partial success.

More than half of 25-year-old, currently invested plan participants were automatically enrolled, according to the research, which the authors believe is evidence that “some of these participants may not have invested in the plan otherwise.”

Yet the average contribution rate for automatically enrolled passive participants is “significantly below” the rates for participants who determined their own contributions. Passive participants have an average contribution rate of just 3.3%, according to the research, starting at that level at age 25 and remaining there during all of their working years.

However, passive plan participants were the least likely to borrow money from their 401(k)s, while active but automatically enrolled participants and self-enrolled participants were slightly more likely to take loans.

Those who were automatically enrolled and have been active within their plans contributed an average of 7 percent of their income into the plan, starting at age 25 with a 5.7 percent average contribution, eventually reaching 8.2 percent at age 65.

Plan participants who had to make an active choice to enroll in their plans started at a 5.5 percent contribution rate, reaching 6.3 percent at age 45 and 7.7 percent at retirement.

Only wealthier plan participants making more than $85,000 a year approached the 10 percent savings rate recommended by many industry experts, according to the researchers—yet the median contribution rate for these higher income earners was only 7.5 percent.

Middle-income plan participants earning between $40,000 and $85,000 annually were the most likely to take a loan from their 401(k). These middle-earning participants also contributed, on average, just 5.7 percent of their income per year.

Lower income earners with less than $40,000 in annual salary were the least likely to take loans from their accounts, but when taking loans they tended to take a higher portion of their account balance. They contributed only an average of 5 percent of their income each year.

At retirement, 401(k) savers withdraw most of their assets out of the plan—the average participant withdraws more than 55 percent from his or her plan in the years around retirement, and the research found that once participants reach 59½, distributions tended to be higher than industry expectations. Lower income earners tended to make larger post-retirement withdrawals than high or middle earners.

Only 28 percent of participants remained in their plans after three years of retirement.

The researchers also looked at spending behavior for plan participants after retirement. While many retired participants, 38 percent, reported permanently or temporarily decreasing their spending during retirement, almost as many, 35 percent, said they had increased spending. Another sizable bloc of participants, 22 percent, said that their spending had remained fairly consistent in retirement, while 7 percent reported “roller-coaster” spending that increased and decreased year by year.

The researchers took these results as evidence that for some people, spending actually increases in the years following a retirement date, and that not all assets exiting a plan around retirement are being rolled over into an IRA.

J.P. Morgan Asset Management suggests that plan sponsors should implement features beyond automatic enrollment, like automatic escalation, to help participants save more. Educational efforts associated with 401(k)s should be targeted at middle- and lower-income earners, according to the report.

“Ready! Fire! Aim?” is based on a quantitative study of 4,000 defined contribution plans encompassing the retirement savings of more than 2 million plan participants.