The full retirement age in the United States reaches 67 in 2026, the highest it has ever been. For anyone born in 1960 or later — which now means everyone approaching traditional retirement — collecting full Social Security benefits requires working a year longer than the previous cohort. That is the policy context. The human context is more revealing. [1]

A BenefitsPro survey published in December found that nearly 30 percent of American seniors have either never retired or plan to return to work in 2026. More than a third of those surveyed said they do not plan to retire until 2030 or later. The word the labor economists use is "unretirement," and it describes a population segment that is growing fast enough to reshape the workforce. [2]

CNBC reported in February that 7 percent of retirees re-entered the labor force in the previous six months, up from 6 percent the prior summer. The reasons divide into two categories that are easy to conflate and important to distinguish. Some seniors are unretiring because they want to — because identity, purpose, and social connection are harder to replace than income. Others are unretiring because they have to — because inflation eroded their savings, because healthcare costs exceeded projections, because the retirement they planned for does not exist at the prices the economy now charges.

The cheerful narrative — seniors returning to work because they love it — obscures the grimmer one. Nearly 30 percent of retirees report having zero retirement savings. Fourteen percent have skipped medical appointments to save money. For these people, unretirement is not an identity choice. It is the absence of one.

The 2026 labor market is being reshaped by people who were supposed to have left it. Whether that is a success story or a policy failure depends entirely on which 30 percent you ask.

-- HENDRIK VAN DER BERG, Brussels