By one measure, at least, there was a bright spot in 2020 for people able to save in workplace retirement plans like 401(k)s.

They watched their account balances rise, on average, 21% during the year, thanks in large part to stock-market gains, according to Vanguard’s annual How America Saves report released Thursday.

Most people don’t actively make trades or even change the mix of investments in these kinds of accounts. Many use funds that plan for a target retirement year and which automatically change the mix of investments over time.

But not everyone left their plan on autopilot. Some 10% of savers moved money between different fund options in their plan in 2020, up from 7% in 2019. The report didn’t say which group of people had better returns.

Emergency pandemic legislation made it easier for some people to withdraw up to $100,000 penalty-free from their accounts last year. Some worried that this would derail retirement savings for those who took advantage of the relaxed access. Vanguard found that about 5.7% of people whose plans allowed the emergency Covid withdrawals took advantage of it, and they withdrew an average of about 40% of the account balance.

The overall good news in Vanguard’s report overshadows the fact that people with lower incomes can’t necessarily afford to put money aside in plans like 401(k)s. Among those who have access to a workplace retirement-savings plan and make less than $15,000, 37% took part in the plan in 2020.

Participation rates rise with income, and nearly all people who make $150,000 or more put money into their workplace retirement-savings accounts. People working in wholesale and retail had the lowest participation rate, at 61%, and workers in finance, insurance and real estate had the highest, at 90%.

Other highlights from the report:

• About 76% of the average account was in stocks across the 4.7 million participants in plans that Vanguard keeps records for.

• The average account balance rose to $129,157 from $106,478 in 2019. The median balance, which is more representative of the typical plan participant, was $33,472, up from $25,775 in 2019. That big gap between average and median balances is due to “a small number of very large accounts that significantly raised the average above the median,” according to the report, which noted that 30% of participants had a balance in 2020 below $10,000 while another 30% had balances above $100,000. 

• Men “have average and median balances that are almost 50% higher than those of women,” the report said. Another gender difference was in behavior: Women traded about 40% less often than their male counterparts.

• The median income of people who participate in Vanguard plans was an estimated $73,000, compared with a median income of $34,000 for employees who did not participate in their company’s plan.

• People devoted an average of 7.2% of their salary to their savings in 2020, a slight rise from the 6.9% average of a decade ago. Some 22% of participants contribute more than 10% of salary and 12% reached the maximum allowable contribution amount for 2020, which was $19,500. When individual and company contributions into plans are combined, the total participant contribution rate was an estimated average of 11.1%.

This article was provided by Bloomberg News.