The Ageing Workforce: How Countries Are Redesigning Work After 60
For generations, turning 60 meant moving closer to the margins of working life. Now it is forcing governments, employers and entire economies to confront a harder question: what does a career look like when later-life work is no longer a choice for some societies, but a structural need?
In much of the world, that assumption is being rewritten. Governments are raising retirement ages, employers are being pushed to rethink careers that stretch longer than they once did, and labor markets are slowly adapting to a future in which ‘’older worker’’ no longer means ‘’almost gone.’’ The pressure is demographic, but the response is increasingly economic: if countries want to keep growth, tax revenues and care systems afloat, they will need millions more people to keep working later in life.
The scale of the shift is already visible in the numbers. Across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the average employment rate for older workers stood at 62 percent in 2022, and for workers ages 55 to 64 it reached 64.6 percent in 2024. But those gains have not erased the gap with prime-age workers, and they have not been evenly shared: in 2022, only 50 percent of older low-skilled workers were employed, compared with 75 percent of their more educated peers. That is one reason the conversation has moved beyond simply urging people to work longer. The harder question is what kind of work will still be available, fair and sustainable after 60.
In Europe, that redesign is already underway. The European Union reported that in 2023, 41 million people ages 55 to 64 were active in the labor market and 39 million were employed. Their activity and employment rates, 67 percent and 63.9 percent, were both almost 20 percentage points higher than in 2009. European officials say those gains have helped offset the drag of population ageing on labor supply. Behind them are several forces working at once: better health, higher educational attainment, changes to pension systems, a growing service economy and a policy shift toward keeping older people attached to the workforce for longer.
But countries are taking different routes to the same destination. In Singapore, the state has made longer working lives an explicit policy goal. The statutory retirement age is 63, but eligible workers must be offered re-employment up to age 68, and both thresholds will rise again in July 2026, to 64 and 69. The government has paired that with wage offsets for employers who hire workers 60 and older, turning longevity into a labor-market design question rather than a private dilemma. The message is clear – a later career should not be a matter of exception or goodwill, it should be built into the structure of employment itself.
Japan, confronting one of the world’s oldest populations, has taken a somewhat different approach. Its employment law requires firms to secure employment opportunities up to age 65, and it encourages measures to keep people working from 65 to 70. Employers can raise the mandatory retirement age, abolish it, or create systems for continuous employment. Legal architecture reflects a broader reality: in fast-ageing societies, later-life work is no longer just about pension adequacy. It is about whether shrinking labor pools can support the productive core of the economy.
Across OECD countries, the same logic is showing up in pension policy. According to the OECD’s latest Pensions at a Glance, the average normal retirement age for those starting a career in 2024 is set to rise to 66.4 for men and 65.9 for women, up from 64.7 and 63.9, respectively, for people retiring in 2024. More than half of OECD countries now have legislation on the books that will raise retirement ages further over time. In a few cases, the endpoint will be 70 or older. That is not simply a technocratic tweak. It is a quiet redefinition of the working life course.
Still, raising the official age is the easy part. Making work after 60 viable is harder. OECD data show that older workers are less likely to receive training than workers in midlife; across the EU, 35 % of workers ages 55 to 64 took part in job-related formal or non-formal training in the previous 12 months, compared with 48 % of those ages 35 to 54. That training gap matters because the jobs growing fastest in many economies are being reshaped by digital tools, AI and climate-related transition pressures. A labor market that expects longer careers but underinvests in reskilling will reproduce inequality rather than solve it.
The deeper tension is that ‘’work after 60’’ means very different things depending on class, health and occupation. It is one thing to extend a professional career in consulting, law or management. It is another to ask the same of a construction worker, a cleaner or a nurse whose body has already absorbed decades of physical strain. The OECD has warned repeatedly that later-life employment remains much weaker among low-skilled workers and that job loss late in life is especially likely to become persistent unemployment or early labor-force exit. In other words, ageing is not just testing pension systems. It is exposing the unequal durability of work itself.
That is why countries taking ageing seriously are no longer treating older workers as a side issue in social policy. They are treating them as central to economic strategy. Keeping people in work longer now means more than tweaking retirement thresholds. It means redesigning jobs, offering flexible schedules, adapting responsibilities, expanding lifelong learning and confronting age discrimination in hiring and promotion. The OECD has been explicit that firms benefit from older workers’ experience, reliability and productivity, but only if labor markets are structured to retain that value rather than waste it.
The old model assumed that age and work moved in opposite directions: one rose as the other receded. The new one is more complicated. In ageing societies, the frontier of work is being pushed outward, not because governments have suddenly become more enlightened, but because the arithmetic of demography is forcing their hand. The countries doing this best are not merely asking people to work longer. They are beginning, however unevenly, to redesign what a longer working life can actually look like.
