Retire at 70: These countries will soon raise the retirement age

Created: 2022-08-20 05:04

By: Andreas Apetz

Some cohorts are allowed to retire before age 67 with no deductions.

(symbol photo) © Britta Pedersen / dpa

A pension report by the OECD shows in which countries pensions at the age of 70 will become a reality in the long term.

Frankfurt – Retirement is a hot topic in Germany.

Stefan Wolf, President of the Gesamtmetall Employers' Association, predicted at the end of July what many consider to be inevitable: "We will gradually have to go up to the retirement age of 70 years - also because the age continues to rise," Wolf told the Funke media group.

The population is outraged, although a retirement age of this magnitude is no longer a dark dystopia of the future, but a reality that some countries are already adjusting to,

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Retirement at 70: The current German retirement age

Retirement at 70 divides the fronts.

In business, a high retirement age has long been advocated.

Economists like Alex Börsch-Supan have long advocated linking retirement with rising life expectancies.

In

he speaks of a correction of the retirement age by one year upwards, about every twelve to 15 years.

However, retirement at the age of 70 would still be further away than expected.

Federal Minister of Labor Hubertus Heil (SPD) nevertheless strictly rejects this idea.

“We have agreed in the coalition that we will not raise the statutory retirement age.

And nothing will change about that," said the Labor Minister of the Funke media group.

The retirement age in Germany, at 67, is already at the upper end from an international perspective, says Heil.

However, the Minister of Labor is not entirely correct.

The age limit for the standard old-age pension without deductions will only be gradually raised to 67 years by 2029.

According to a pension report by the OECD, which is available to

, the legal retirement age for Germans was 65.7 years last year - compared to the other OECD industrialized countries, Germany is in the top quarter.

So far, Iceland, Norway and Israel are the frontrunners when it comes to the retirement age of 67.

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Retire at 70?

A slap in the overworked face

Retirement at the age of 70: In Europe, people often retire before the legal limit

The prescribed entry age and the actual entry into the pension therefore often deviate from one another.

According to the OECD study, the Japanese are the latest to retire at the age of 68.2 on average.

Legally and without deductions, this would actually be possible at the age of 65.

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In Europe it is rather the other way round.

People there often leave the labor market before they reach the statutory retirement age.

According to the OECD, men and women in France retire almost three years earlier on average.

The statutory retirement age there is 63.5 years.

At 63.1 years, German employees also retire earlier than the statutory requirement.

You can find out how early retirement without deductions works here.

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Retirement: In these states, the future retirement age is already over 70 years

While in Germany, retirement at the age of 70 is largely met with anger and indignation, other countries have already accepted their fate.

A look at the statistics of the OECD reveals that almost all member countries expect an increase in the retirement age in the future.

This is particularly the case in Turkey.

In the future, men will only be able to retire there without deductions 13 years later.

Currently, the Turkish retirement age is 52 years.

That may seem comparatively low, but people in Turkey are the most hard-working workers in Europe at around 48.3 hours per week.

*Future retirement age: Applies to people who entered the labor market in 2020 at the age of 22

In Estonia or Italy, the retirement age will be 71 in the future.

For Italy, this means raising the age limit to nine years.

According to the OECD, Denmark is increasing by 8.5 years and only allows a pension without deductions from the age of 74 in the long term.

Retirement at 70: Response to demographic change

The future retirement age will not come into force suddenly, but will apply to people who entered the labor market in 2020 at the age of 22.

But the pension system is in an imbalance: Fewer and fewer people in work have to finance more and more pensioners.

The demographic structures presented in the OECD pension report already predict the problems of aging societies.

By 2060, the working age population will decrease by around ten percent on average across OECD countries.

In countries like Greece, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland even by 35 percent or more.

Similar to Germany, these countries must also ask themselves how they will close this gaping gap in the labor market in the future.

In Germany, solutions in the matter of pensions are already being considered.

But so far the answer is probably a longer working life.

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