More at Retiring in the US or Planning for Retirement Later

WASHINGTON, DC — American workers are retiring at a later age than they have in the last three decades. In 1991, US retirees reported retiring at age 57, on average. Now the average reported retirement age is up to 61. The target retirement age for non-pensioners has also increased from 60 in 1995 to 66 today.

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This data is based on Gallup’s annual survey on the economy and personal finance, conducted each April. Gallup has asked about retirement age in this survey since 2002, periodically updating trends set in other Gallup surveys in 1991, 1992, 1993 and 1995.

The later retirement ages come at a time when U.S. workers are not eligible for full Social Security retirement benefits until age 65. In 1983, Congress raised the age at which people can receive full retirement benefits. Those born between 1937 and 1959 – the youngest of whom are now 62 – are entitled to full benefits at a predetermined age over 65 but under 67, depending on their year of birth. Anyone born after 1960 is not eligible for full benefits until age 67. Pensioners are entitled to reduced benefits from the age of 62.

Difference between expected and actual retirement age

In addition to upward trends in both expected and actual retirement ages, Gallup consistently finds that the reported retirement age of retirees is about five years less than the expected retirement age of the non-retired. This may largely reflect the reality that many current retirees have been able to retire at a younger age and receive full Social Security benefits than today’s workers will be able to. However, as both expected and actual retirement ages have increased over the past two decades and more recent retirees are subject to new age requirements to receive full benefits, the gap between expected and actual retirement ages continues.

This continuing gap may mean that workers incorrectly anticipate that they will be able to work longer than they end up doing, either because their employer has other plans or because an unexpected health or family situation may leave them unable to work at an older age. However, Gallup’s data cannot determine whether this is the case. Gallup asks the expected retirement age of a sample of non-retirees and the actual retirement age of a sample of retirees, so while the findings can show whether group-level averages are changing, they can’t tell whether individual workers are retiring earlier. age of them planned to.

The confounding effects of individuals’ age at the time of interview and their retirement status at that time may contribute to the persistent difference in actual versus expected retirement ages among retirees and nonretirees. Many currently retired people stopped working at a relatively young age, so a sample of retirees aged 65 and under will tend to lower the average retirement age of all retirees interviewed in a survey. Similarly, non-retirees in their mid- to late 60s or 70s will report a higher expected retirement age, which raises the average expected retirement age of non-retirees interviewed in a given survey.

Gallup can isolate the effects of age on retirement status by looking at the proportion of all adults who are retired among different age groups to see if those percentages change over time.

For the analysis, 21 years of data from the Economic and Personal Finance Survey were divided into three roughly equal time periods. This ensures adequate sample sizes for relatively narrow five-year age ranges.

The data show that there was relatively little change in retirement status among Americans under 55 or 75 and older between 2002-2007 and 2016-2022.

Among Americans nearing or past traditional retirement age — those between the ages of 55 and 74 — significantly fewer people are retiring than were the case for people in the same age group at the start of the 21^St century. Each five-year age group saw a decline of between five and nine percentage points in the number of retired Americans, with the largest declines in the 55-59 age range (from 19% to 11%) and in the 60-64 age range (from 41% to 32%).

There was a smaller but still significant decline in the number of US adults aged 65 to 69 (from 76% to 70%) and those aged 70 to 74 (from 88% to 83%) who are pensioners.

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It is not clear to what extent these patterns of later retirement are related to household income. The survey collects data on current income status, and retirees typically report much lower incomes than non-retirees given the lack of regular paychecks for retirees. Thus, it is not possible to know whether the shift to a later retirement age is occurring more among lower- or higher-income workers.

Bottom row

The average retirement age among retirees is now 61, up from 57 in 1991. And if active workers retire when they plan, the average retirement age will increase even more in the coming decades.

Changes to Social Security benefits enacted in the 1980s take effect for today’s retirement-age workers and provide incentives for people to stay on the job longer to maximize their monthly benefits after retirement. The longer life expectancy of U.S. adults may also be a factor in later retirement ages, with workers perhaps seeing a need to save more money in anticipation of a retirement that could last 10, 20 or 30 years, especially with rising cost of living. In addition, the shift from a manufacturing economy to an economy focused primarily on the provision of services and information makes it easier to work into older age.

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