Retirement Ages on the Rise: A Global Shift in 2025

In 2020, I wrote about the growing pressure from businesses, financial institutions, and governments to raise retirement ages or delay eligibility for public pensions. Five years later, the debate has not faded in fact, it has intensified. What was once considered a politically toxic idea has, in many countries, become part of long-term fiscal planning. The challenge is straightforward: people are living longer, but fertility rates are falling. That means fewer workers are supporting more retirees, and the costs of sustaining pension systems are rising rapidly. Over the next three posts I will look at this issue in more depth.

Across the globe, governments are grappling with the same problem: how to keep pension systems affordable without triggering extreme public debt. New Zealand’s Treasury, for example, has again raised alarms about the sustainability of its pension program. Officials warn that without either higher taxes or a higher retirement age, the country faces a trajectory of unsustainable debt. Yet most political parties remain unwilling to propose a jump from 65 to 72, knowing how unpopular such a move would be.

The dilemma is hardly unique to New Zealand. According to the OECD, more countries are now tying retirement age to life expectancy, ensuring that as people live longer, they also work longer. Europe has been at the forefront of this shift, with projections showing that average retirement ages will approach 67 , or higher , by 2060. Denmark, in fact, has already legislated an increase to 70 by 2040, the highest in Europe.

China joined the wave in 2024 with sweeping reforms that will gradually raise statutory retirement ages for men and women over the next 15 years. Meanwhile, in Czechia, lawmakers voted in 2024 to delay retirement for future cohorts and reduce pension payouts for younger workers, an explicit recognition that current benefits are unsustainable.

The United States is moving more cautiously but along the same path. In 2025, people born in 1959 will see their Social Security full retirement age rise to 66 years and 10 months. Gradual increases are already built into the system, and further proposals are under consideration to index retirement age to life expectancy in future decades.