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When does Europe retire, and how many healthy years are left at 65?
In Germany, people now aged 65 to 74 started their old-age pension at 62.6 on average. At 65, people in Germany can expect 19.7 more years of life, 8.6 of them without health limitations: fewer than the EU-27 average of 10.3, 18th of 27 EU countries (Luxembourg has no 2024 figures).
EU-27: healthy years at 65
Most
Fewest
Germany
Life after 65, one block per year, 2024
Each block is a year a 65-year-old can expect to live. Filled blocks are years without health limitations. The red marker is the average age at which people started their old-age pension. Countries are ranked by healthy years. Click a row to pick a country.
Pension or retirement? Here, retiring means starting to receive an old-age pension. Stopping work can happen at a different time: some people leave work years before their pension starts, others keep working while they draw it.
Table view: all countries
| Rank | Country | Pension age | Years left at 65 | Healthy | With limitations | Share healthy |
|---|
Sources
- Eurostat: Healthy life years by sex (from 2004 onwards) (
hlth_hlye). CC BY 4.0, © European Union. Last updated , retrieved . - Eurostat: Age at which the person started receiving an old-age pension (2023) (
lfso_23pens03). CC BY 4.0, © European Union. Last updated , retrieved . - The data on this page: CSV, same licence and credit.
Notes
Healthy life years are the years a person can expect to live without being limited in usual activities because of a health problem for at least six months, as people report it themselves in the EU statistics on income and living conditions (EU-SILC). Eurostat combines these answers with mortality data. Because the answers are self-reported, cultural differences in how people judge their health affect comparisons between countries; changes within a country are more reliable than small gaps between countries.
Eurostat measures healthy years from age 65, not from the age people retire, so the chart starts the blocks at 65. They show how many years are healthy, not when: drawing the healthy years first is a simplification. The pension age is the average age at which people aged 65 to 74 in 2023 started receiving an old-age pension (EU Labour Force Survey), including early retirement. It measures when the pension started, not when people stopped working. The years between the pension age and 65 are not split into healthy and not healthy, because Eurostat publishes no healthy life years for those ages. Values Eurostat marks provisional or estimated are labelled so in the tooltip and the table. Luxembourg has no 2024 figures (latest: 9.8 healthy years of 21.0 at 65 in 2022); it is listed without blocks and not ranked.