With an increase in longevity and the demise of corporate pension plans, it is hardly a surprise to note there are more “older” Americans in the workforce, at least when analyzing demographic trends in recent decades.
Pew Research Center recently did just that—quantifying how quickly the cohort is growing and what they’re earning.
The organization found that roughly one in five Americans aged 65 and older were employed in 2023. For comparison, it’s almost double the number of similarly aged workers 35 years ago, according to Pew’s Richard Fry and Dana Braga, and they are outpacing younger worker wage growth, significantly narrowing the gap between older workers and those ages 25 to 64.
There are two other ways that older workers today differ from previous generations:
- On average, they’re working more hours (62% of older workers are working full time, compared with 47% in 1987).
- They’re more likely to have a college degree. While 44% of older workers today have a bachelor’s degree or higher, just 18% did in 1987.
“They’re more likely than in previous decades to be receiving employer-provided benefits such as pension plans and health insurance,” Fry and Braga wrote. “The same does not hold true for younger workers, whose access to these employer-provided benefits has decreased in recent decades. For example, among workers ages 65 and older, 36% now have the option to participate in an employer- or union-sponsored retirement plan (either an old-style pension or a 401(k)-type plan), up from 33% in 1987. Only 41% of younger workers have access to this type of retirement plan at work, down from 55% in 1987.”
And older workers are more than twice as likely as younger workers to be self-employed, reflecting a long-running trend (23% compared with 10% of workers ages 25 to 64).
They conclude that because of the factors they describe, “more older adults in the workforce, working longer hours with higher levels of education and greater pay per hour,” older workers’ contribution has grown significantly. In 2023, they accounted for 7% of all wages and salaries paid by U.S. employers, more than triple the share in 1987 (2%).
