Fact Sheets

The recession has increased joblessness among older Americans. These graphs and tables report unemployment rates and how they have varied by age, sex, race, and education since 2007.

Improved health, educational gains, and declines in physically demanding work have improved employment prospects at older ages, yet significant challenges remain. This fact sheet reports key data points on older Americans' labor force participation, employment, unemployment, and related factors.

Increasing Social Security's retirement age would promote work at older ages, improve the system's solvency by shortening retirements and reducing lifetime benefits, and better target benefits to the oldest Americans. It could, however, create hardship for workers with health problems unless Congress improves the disability safety net. This fact sheet reports key data points in the arguments for and against increasing the retirement age.

The retirement savings of American households took a big hit when the stock market crashed in 2008. Recently, however, a good portion of these losses has been reversed. This fact sheet follows trends in retirement account balances since the beginning of 2005.

Social Security's current path is unsustainable. With average life spans increasing, the working-age population is not growing fast enough to support the growing number of retirees at current benefit levels and tax rates. Benefit cuts, revenue enhancements, or some combination could return the system to balance. The arithmetic is fairly straightforward, but impacts on workers and retirees depend crucially on design details. Using a microsimulation model, we show distributional effects of illustrative benefit-cut and revenue-enhancement options on retirees. Results show that impacts differ greatly for workers in different generations and age groups and with different lifetime earnings.