What Is My Retirement Age? A Country-by-Country Guide

Jessica David · 6 April 2026

If you have ever tried to look up "what age can I retire" you will know the answer is rarely a single number. It depends where you live, when you were born, whether you are claiming a state pension or a private one, and whether the goalposts have moved since you first checked.

This is a plain-English overview of how state pension ages currently work in major economies, and how to find the exact date you reach yours.

What "retirement age" actually means

Most countries have several different "retirement ages" running at once.

State pension age — the age at which the government starts paying you a state pension
Private pension age — the age at which you can access workplace or personal pensions
Full retirement age — the age at which you receive 100% of your earned benefit, with no reduction
Early retirement age — the earliest you can claim, usually with a permanent reduction

This article focuses on state pension age, because it is the figure most people mean when they ask the question and the figure most likely to be set by law.

A quick comparison

State pension ages for somebody born around 1970, by country:

United Kingdom — 67 (from 2028); planned increases to 68 between 2044 and 2046
United States — 67 for full Social Security; 62 minimum with reduced benefits
Germany — 67, gradually phased in for everyone born after 1964
France — 64 (post-2023 reform), up from 62
Italy — 67, indexed to life expectancy
Spain — 65 to 67 depending on contribution years
Japan — 65 (gradually rising for some categories)
Canada — 65 for full Old Age Security; 60 minimum for CPP with reduction
Australia — 67 for the Age Pension
Netherlands — currently 67 and indexed to life expectancy

These numbers move. Almost every developed country has raised, or is in the process of raising, its state pension age over the last decade.

Why retirement ages keep going up

The basic arithmetic is uncomfortable but simple. State pensions are largely funded by current workers' contributions paying current retirees' pensions. As lifespans rise and birth rates fall, fewer workers are funding more retirees for longer.

A retirement age of 65, set in the 1940s when life expectancy was around 70, was designed to fund five or six years of retirement. The same age today funds twenty or more. Either contributions go up, or the retirement age moves to keep the maths working. Most governments have chosen the second.

Calculating your exact retirement date

Most people know roughly when they can retire. Far fewer know the exact date. It is worth calculating, because it changes how plans land in real time.

The maths is straightforward:

1. Take your date of birth

2. Add your country's full retirement age in years (e.g. 67)

3. Adjust for any month-and-day rules — some countries (like the UK) tier the retirement age by birth month within a transition period

4. The result is the date you become eligible

For example, a UK resident born on 12 March 1980 and retiring at 67 reaches state pension age on 12 March 2047. A French resident born on the same day reaches 64 on 12 March 2044.

If you want the exact age you'll be on a particular date — a relative's birthday, a specific anniversary, a planned milestone — the How Old Will I Be tool does the maths in your browser without storing anything.

Things to think about beyond the date

The headline retirement age is only one of several decisions worth making. Worth knowing:

Tax — pension income is taxed differently from earned income in most jurisdictions
Healthcare — in some countries (notably the US) the age for state-funded healthcare is different from the pension age
Phased retirement — most workplace pensions allow partial drawdown well before state pension age
Deferring — many state systems pay a higher amount if you defer claiming. The trade-off is usually broadly fair actuarially, but worth checking

Retirement is one of the few life events with a clearly calculable date attached. Knowing the exact day, well in advance, removes a small but persistent piece of uncertainty from the planning. And the further away it is, the longer your decisions have to compound. In the meantime, you can see how old you are today in years, months and days, accurate to the second. For the other practical reasons people check their exact age, see 10 surprising real-world uses of an age calculator; for the round-number milestones that often arrive close to retirement, read the milestones everyone hits.

Calculate your age on any future date — Type in a date and see exactly how old you'll be when you get there.

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