Retirement age for employees is approaching 66

Nearly three quarters of employees are 65 years or older at retirement

From 2013 onwards, the average retirement age of employees has more or less kept pace with the applicable state pension age. Partly due to the increase in the state pension age, the retirement age of employees is increasing. Only in 2021 was the retirement age slightly lower than a year earlier. In 2023, 74 percent of employees will be 65 years or older at the time of retirement. Ten years earlier (2013) this was 43 percent and twenty years ago (2003) 14 percent were 65 years or older at the time of retirement. At that time, people could still make use of early retirement schemes, which were largely stopped after 2006.

In 2003, almost three quarters of employees were younger than 62 at the time of retirement . In 2023 that was less than 6 percent.

More than half of pensioners come from work

More than 200 thousand people retired in 2021. Of these, 57 percent had wages or income from their own business as their main source of income a year earlier. More than a quarter had received social security benefits a year earlier. This usually stops when you reach state pension age.

Of pensioners, 16 percent had no income of their own a year earlier. This usually concerns women who have reached state pension age. Due to the increased labor participation of women in particular, this share without income has decreased by 12 percentage points over the past 10 years, i.e. almost halved. The share from work, on the other hand, has increased by 11 percentage points.

Number of retirees not increased

After the relatively strong increases in the number of retirees in 2020 and 2021 with around 50 thousand per year, the number of retirees stabilized slightly in 2022 and 2023 3.3 million. Due to population growth, the share of retirees among the total population decreased slightly to 18.3 percent in 2023. This applies even more to the share of retirees among those aged 55 and over. This has decreased almost continuously every year from the beginning of this century, mainly due to increased labor participation among the elderly. In 2023, less than 54 percent of people over 55 in the Netherlands would be retired, compared to more than 62 percent at the beginning of this century.