Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, is working to persuade Americans that they should postpone retirement for one year. The question is whether they’ll buy it.
He has repeatedly said delaying retirement — a fraught decision for millions, especially lower earners who have undersaved for it — marks physical vigor, and could help grow the economy or reduce the national debt.
Getting the average American to work one year longer by starting earlier or retiring later would generate about $3 trillion for the economy because “they feel healthy, they’re vital, they feel strong, they have agency over their future,” Oz said at the National Press Club on Monday.
“It’s better for society if people engage for longer,” Oz said in an interview.
The Democratic National Committee attacked Oz’s proposal in a press release Tuesday, suggesting he was advocating for people to work longer to help pay for President Donald Trump’s tax and immigration bill, which added roughly $3.4 trillion to the federal deficit.
As the political debate intensifies, salary and education are likely to deeply influence how people hear that message, research shows.
Wealthier Americans are already engaging longer. Those with college degrees and higher income tend to retire later, have more savings and live longer, researchers have found. They’re more likely to be interested in their work and see it as part of their identity.
Seventy-six percent of people with a graduate degree are still working at age 67, compared with 39 percent of people with only a high school diploma, according to the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis.
People who didn’t attend college and earn less have a vastly different experience. They’re more likely to work in physically demanding roles, retire earlier, have less savings and die sooner. They are far less likely to have the kinds of mentally stimulating, well-paid jobs that could keep them excited to work longer, as Oz is suggesting.
“Most people do not have jobs that are that intellectually engaging, and they have other things they want to do in life,” said Teresa Amabile, a Harvard Business School professor who has studied why people decide to retire.
Deann McZegle, 65, said her decision to retire as an IT specialist at the Justice Department at age 59 wasn’t difficult. She had largely enjoyed her job visiting employees’ work stations to troubleshoot their computer problems. But McZegle was starting to get a “bad attitude” about the work she had been doing for 19 years.
“I was just like, nah, I don’t want to be here anymore,” she said.
Now she said she feels “content” spending her time reading, exercising and hanging out with her cats.
Margaret Spellings, the 68-year-old president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank, said she plans to stay in her role through the rest of the Trump administration and won’t step down from one of the boards she serves on until she hits the age ceiling at 75.
“I think people who retire too early are boring, boring, boring,” said Spellings, who served as education secretary under President George W. Bush. “They play pickleball and have nothing to do and watch too much TV. That ain’t me.”
Retirement age has been rising across the board for decades, although estimates range because there’s no fixed definition for retirement.
The average American now works about four years longer than during the 1980s, according to Gallup polling. In 2024, men retired at 64.6 and women retired at 62.6 on average, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. Oz often cites the results of a 2022 Gallup poll, where people reported retiring at 61.
But the rise in retirement age may be slowing. The factors that drove it have mostly played out, including Congress raising the Social Security eligibility age by two years, gains in education and life expectancy, and fewer employee pensions, said Alicia Munnell, a senior adviser to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.
“People with low earnings, they really can’t work much longer than they are working,” Munnell said.
Munnell, 83, led her center until a little more than a year ago and shifted to a lower-commitment advisory role.
“I’m a strong advocate of, if you can, keep working as long as you can,” she said. “Nothing is better in life than structure. It eliminates a lot of anxiety, and a lot of people get joy out of their work.”
Peter Young, 65, of Alexandria, Virginia, is still working — but not because he wants to. He would love to retire from his job at Reagan National Airport transporting rental cars but needs the money. The roughly $800 he collects from Social Security every month isn’t enough to cover his rent. He says the work boring but noted he has found it hard to get job interviews at his age.
“I was hoping to enjoy the rest of my golden years, but that’s not going to happen right now,” he said.
Higher earners can work longer partly because they tend to live longer. Life expectancy for the richest 5 percent of Americans is roughly eight years longer for men and five years longer for women than for the poorest 5 percent.
Those disparities are “unfortunate,” and the administration is trying to “fix that,” Oz said. Part of the solution is getting people healthier — largely through better diets — so they’re motivated to work longer, he said.
“I do have concerns that part of the reason people retire at age 61 instead of 65 is because they don’t feel healthy,” he said. “They retire and sort of fix their health, and it should be the opposite: Your health should be tuned up the whole time.”
People who work longer tend to enjoy better physical and emotional health, and have stronger social connections. That’s partly correlation — healthier people are more likely to work than sicker people — but staying in the workplace can also help people stay sharp, according to Debra Whitman, chief public policy officer for AARP.
“When we have mentally stimulating work, it helps slow the pace of cognitive decline,” Whitman said. “Mind-numbing jobs tend to do the opposite.”
Oz has been airing another argument for people working longer: It helps the economy.
He’s roughly correct. If everyone on the verge of retirement were suddenly to decide to work just one more year, gross domestic product would grow by $6 trillion over a decade, estimated Marc Goldwein, senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan group that opposes large federal deficits. It would also extend solvency for Social Security, which is projected to be depleted roughly seven years from now.
But people decide to retire based on highly personal reasons — their savings, job satisfaction or health.
Congress already tried to motivate people to work longer with 1983 legislation that gradually raised the eligibility age for full Society Security benefits from 65 to 67. It worked — but lower-income people still claim these benefits earlier than wealthier people.
And that means paying a penalty. Someone earning $62,000 a year — the median U.S. salary for full-time workers — would get $1,293 a month if they start claiming at age 62, according to Social Security’s benefit calculator. The payment goes up to $1,959 if they wait until 67. Waiting until 70 — the age the maximum benefit becomes available — would get them $2,514.
Waiting to claim Social Security is “a really good way to improve retirement well-being,” said Karen Smith, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, who studies taxes and subsidies.
But the people claiming later tend to already be in a better financial position. Twenty-seven percent of people earning less than $37,500 had claimed Social Security by age 63, compared with 8 percent of those earning more than $70,000, accordingto a 2023 analysis by the Schwartz Center.
Young said he claimed Social Security after turning 65 after he had been fired from a previous job as a material specialist at the airport, where he helped transport airplane parts on the tarmac. He kept job hunting, though, and said he found his current one — which he said pays $14 an hour — because he has never been able to save for retirement.
“I’ve got no choice,” he said.
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