Could owning a pet affect the way you view life during retirement?
Turns out Fido or Whiskers may have a bigger influence on your post-work happiness than you thought.
Full disclosure: I’m a retirement researcher by profession, and I’m also an animal lover. My wife is a veterinarian, and we’re proud pet parents to three dogs, two guinea pigs and a tortoise.
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In other words, I don’t need to do any research beyond my own home to know the profound impact a pet can make at any stage of life.
Still, I was delighted that Prudential included a few questions about pet ownership in the Global Retirement Pulse Survey it did last summer. And it’s really not much of a stretch — the cost of owning a pet should absolutely be a factor in building a comprehensive retirement income plan.
Some things we learned aren’t particularly surprising: Pet ownership declines notably by age, people who owned pets before are likely to want a pet during retirement, and most people don’t fully consider all the costs of owning a pet after they’re done working.
Cats vs dogs
Now for the fun part, and I realize I may have buried the bone — I mean, buried the lede. I wanted to see whether pet ownership — specifically cats and dogs — is related to changes in life outlook. So, we asked whether someone’s outlook on life has gotten better with age.
Drum roll, please: Go give your dog a treat! People who own dogs report having better life outlooks than those with cats. And people who have cats actually reported life outlooks that were worse than people without pets (I mentioned this to a few cats I know, and perhaps not surprisingly, they just don’t care).
I was curious if other factors like wealth could be driving this, so I ran some additional calculations, and it turns out I wasn’t barking up the wrong tree. See the results below.
So, I can’t offer any guarantees from our research. But if you think owning a dog in retirement will bring a lasting smile to your face, who am I to disagree?
(Image credit: Courtesy of David Blanchett)
(Image credit: Courtesy of David Blanchett)
(Image credit: Courtesy of David Blanchett)
For over 20 years Prudential has been studying broader economic trends impacting Americans in its Pulse survey. The latest, the Global Retirement Pulse Survey, expands the geographic footprint and includes responses from the U.S., Brazil, Mexico, and Japan (for this analysis I just focus on just the U.S. respondents). The survey was conducted online by Brunswick Group between August 8-22, 2025 and there were 1,000 U.S. respondents. Note, the survey only included “mass affluent” adults, who are defined as age 30+ with at least $100,000 in investable assets.