Savers, taxpayers, tenants: the money winners and losers of 2025 revealed

A look a who is finishing the year in a strong position and who has had 12 months to forget.

Keeping with the trend for this decade, 2025 was yet another tumultuous one for our finances.

While much of it was inevitably bad news for most, there were some positive outcomes as well.

So let’s take a look at the money winners and losers of 2025.

The Winners

Workers earning the National Living Wage

Employees on earning the lowest hourly wages have enjoyed a sharp increase to their wages this year, with more to come in 2026.

The Government increased the National Living Wage, which is the Minimum Wage for anyone aged 21 or over, almost 7% in April of this year and will rise again by more than 4% come next April.

As a result, their hourly pay will have rocketed from £11.44 to £12.71 in the space of just 15 months.

For someone working full-time, this will earn them an extra £2,400, taking their salary to £24,784 from April 2026.

Gold investors

Gold has long had a reputation for being a ‘safe haven’ asset, a good place to hold money during volatile times.

For while other investments can fluctuate wildly, gold has proved remarkably stable over the decades.

That is, up until recently.

Having started the year valued at around $2,600 (£1,970) an ounce, it’s currently trading at around $4,200 (£3,180), an increase of around 60% in just 11 months.

The graph below, from Gold.org, highlights just how unusual it is to see such a seismic rise over such a short period of time.

Source: Gold.org

And it’s not just gold that’s soared: silver has jumped 80% in the space of 10 months, as more and more investors targeted traditional ‘safe haven’ investments in response to all the market volatility witnessed in 2025.

Anyone who made the move early in the year has been richly rewarded.

Retirees on lower incomes

It’s been an especially busy year in terms of retiree finances, and most of it has been positive.

The first boost came in the form of a Government backtrack on Winter Fuel Payments, which provides up to £300 help towards energy bills.

Having faced widespread anger when it scrapped the allowance for all but the lowest earners, the Government announced this Summer it would be making it available to all households that earn less than £35,000 a year.

An interesting knock-on effect of the initial ban has been the fact that many more low-income households are now notably better off this year.

When the Government initially announced the Winter Fuel clampdown in 2024, it said only those in receipt of Pension Credit would qualify.

This Credit can be worth as much as £4,300 a year, but so many poorer households fail to claim it because they simply don’t know about it or wrongly assume they aren’t eligible.

The widespread publicity surrounding the Winter Fuel Payments fiasco helped dramatically increase awareness about this vital help, and many more low-income households faced a more comfortable 2025 as a result.

Another piece of good news was the State Pension rising by 4.1% in April, an increase of around £470 a year for someone on the full State Pension.

This will be followed up by a 4.8%, or £570, increase in April 2026, which should comfortably outstrip inflation for that year as well.

Savers

While savers may not have had an especially good year, they are winners in the sense that things turned out better than expected.

If we rewind back to January, there were two big concerns facing savers.

First was the threat of inflation.

With various tax hikes kicking in from April, most notably the NI hike for companies, price rises were expected across the board.

Given that CPI was already above target at 2.5% at the start of the year, there were real fears we were in for another brutal year of high inflation, meaning savers would need to secure generous rates of interest to avoid losing money in real terms.

Which brings us to the second threat: falling rates. Back in January, analysts forecast that we would see four Base Rate cuts throughout 2025, dragging the Base Rate to 3.75%.

That prediction is certainly on track, with three already having taken place and a fourth cut later this month now seen as likely.

Given that rate cuts themselves are also inflationary and will also lead to lower savings rates, it's fair to say the outlook at the start of the year was uncertain at best.

As things turned out, savers were able to comfortably stay ahead of inflation provided they were willing to move their money.

The top fixed-rate and access savings accounts paid between 4.4% and 5% throughout 2025, while inflation hasn’t exceeded 3.8%.

As we said earlier, it’s not exactly a resounding win, but an outcome many savers would have happily accepted last Winter.

The Losers

Taxpayers

Undoubtedly, the biggest losers of 2025.

Not only were taxpayers hit with a raft of painful hikes earlier in the year, but they ended it knowing that things are only going to get worse in the years ahead.

And there really wasn’t any good news to counter that.

Let’s run through some of the most notable blows that arrived in April.

First, there was the now customary 5% Council Tax hike, which added £100 to the average tax bill.

Then there was the Stamp Duty hikes, which hammered first-time buyers in particular.

Investors and landlords were also hit with a sharp rise in Capital Gains Tax rates.

With inflation rising sharply at the same time, household budgets were facing a double whammy of rising bills and taxes.

Fast forward to November, and another slew of tax hikes were announced, which will be rolled out between now and 2031.

This includes a new tax on electric and hybrid motorists, a levy on high-value properties, higher taxes on property and dividend incomes and more.

And, if you wanted to simply not spend your money and set it aside instead, well, that’ll likely mean more tax as well following changes to the salary sacrifice scheme, a reduction in the Cash ISA allowance and an increase in savings interest tax.

Don’t forget the stealth tax hikes

A special mention must go to the hated freeze on personal allowances, which is effectively an Income Tax hike delivered via the back door.

It was first introduced back in 2021/22 and was due to run for four years.

We should now be nearing the end of this costly stealth tax hike but, due to a series of extensions to this temporary measure, we are now actually further from the end than when it was first introduced.

It’s currently due to end in April 2031, five years and five months from now.

Another point that’s often overlooked is that this tax hike gets more egregious each year it lasts, as the point at which we are supposed to start paying a higher tax rate drifts further into the distance.

And, unless there are as-yet-unannounced plans to massively increase the thresholds to reflect a decade of freezes, then these tax rises are effectively baked in for life.

In short, Christmas cheer feels in awful short supply for the British taxpayer this December.

Employers

As referenced earlier, the Government increased employer National Insurance (NI) contributions from 13.8% to 15% in April.

What’s more, businesses now have to pay NI contributions on an employee's earnings threshold of £5,000, rather than the previous £9,100.

And while employees may have been shielded from the increase on paper, in reality, some will have paid the price in the form of fewer pay rises and even job losses, if small businesses were unable to cover the additional costs.

Tenants

It was another tough year for tenants as rent increases once again outstripped average wage growth.

In the 12 months to October, the latest date for which we have official figures, the typical rent increased by 5% to £1,360.

By contrast, wages grew by 4.4% during the same period, meaning rents now take up a larger chunk of tenants’ salaries each month.

According to the latest figures, they hand over 36.3% of their income, up slightly from the 36% total in 2024.

Investors who panicked

The stock market crash of 2025 provided a valuable lesson about riding out a storm.

Triggered by swingeing tariffs introduced by US President Donald Trump, stock markets plummeted around the world.

Both the FTSE 100 and the S&P 500 lost between 10% and 15% of their total value in March and early April.

The April sell-off was particularly sharp, with the S&P 500 reportedly losing $5 trillion (£3.8trn) in just two trading days.

Thankfully, most investment firms reported that the number of panic sellers was relatively low, but those who did so did not have to wait long to realise their error.

As you can see from the graph below, the S&P 500 had fully recovered by the Summer and, at the time of writing, is up almost 15% on their pre-crash levels.

And it was a similar story for most other major indices as well.

Source: Yahoo Finance