People Working Past Retirement Age

What Is This?

The share of people at or past Social Security's full retirement age who are working or looking for work, from the Current Population Survey, the monthly survey behind the unemployment rate, since 1948. That age was 65 until the law began raising it, so the line counts 65 and over through 2002, 66 and over from 2003, and 67 and over from 2021; the hatched bands mark the years the age was rising. Fewer people work at 66 than at 65, so the line steps down where each band begins: the age moved, not a wave of retirements.

Why Does It Matter?

Each year of work past that age is a year of pay rather than a year of drawing savings down, and each year past it that a person waits to claim Social Security, up to 70, raises the check for life by 8%. The share fell by more than half from the late 1940s to the mid-1980s as Social Security and pensions spread, then climbed for three decades as 401(k)s took pensions' place.

Can Politics Influence It?

Directly. The 1983 Social Security amendments raised the full retirement age in two steps, Congress ended mandatory retirement for most jobs in 1986, and in 2000 it stopped withholding benefits from people past the full retirement age who keep earning. Medicare at 65 pulls the other way, since a job is no longer the only way to get health insurance.

Key Idea

A rise can mean healthier people choosing to work or people who cannot afford to stop, and a fall can mean comfortable retirements or jobs that vanished, so it is charted and not scored. It also moves with who is old: as a large generation ages into its eighties, the share can fall even if no one retires sooner.

Not Scored