What Is the Ideal Retirement Age for Your Health? (2024)

In 1881, the conservative German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, plagued by a rise in socialist ideology, proposed a national retirement benefit to appease the leftist masses. He set the retirement age at 70. Average life expectancy at the time? About 40 years.

Von Bismarck resigned shortly after the policy passed, but his legacy remained, and Germany’s retirement benefit (which was lowered to age 65 in 1916) became the model for many other nations. When President Roosevelt established the Social Security Act of 1935, 65 was similarly chosen as the national retirement age, despite the fact that less than 60 percent of American adults lived that long.

Which is all to say, the national retirement age in the U.S. and elsewhere has origins in a bit of political smoke and mirrors; it began as a symbolic offering, accessible only to the lucky citizens who managed to survive well into old age.

Today though, many more people live long enough to have access to a national retirement fund, often for years if not decades. Average life expectancy in the United States is 76, and in many European countries it’s even higher. The U.S. national retirement age — when you can start claiming full Social Security benefits — has crept up much more gradually, to 67 for people born after 1960.

In response, several countries — most notoriously France, where the retirement age is 62 and life expectancy is 82 — are debating raising the retirement age to try to offset the economic pressures of an aging population and the concern that national retirement benefits won’t be able to keep up for much longer.

From an economic standpoint, a later retirement age perhaps benefits everyone’s bottom line. But putting finances aside, what are the mental and physical implications of raising a national retirement age? We asked experts to weigh in.