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What Raising the Social Security Retirement Age Would Mean for Today's Workers

The idea has gained traction among some policymakers, but the brunt of benefit cuts would fall on younger Americans

8-minute read

Deirdre Shesgreen,

AARP

Published October 08, 2026

A person standing in an arch formed by a social security card, looking down an endless track toward a sky.

Lily Qian

Key takeaways

Another increase in the full retirement age would significantly cut lifetime Social Security benefits.
Younger generations would bear the financial cost of such a move since Congress is likely to phase any changes in gradually.
Proponents of raising the retirement age point to Americans’ longer lifespans, but those gains are concentrated among those with high incomes.

When Congress voted in 1983 to raise Social Security’s full retirement age, Janet Parmelee was 24 years old, working as an emergency room nurse and pregnant with her first child.

Retirement was not on her radar. And she couldn’t have known how a decision made by lawmakers in Washington that year would affect her decades later, when her husband was diagnosed with a progressive form of dementia and their careful retirement plans were upended.

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In 2022, the Connecticut resident had to stop working — three years earlier than she had planned — to become a full-time caregiver. “I just couldn’t leave him by himself,” she says. “I ended up fully retiring and collecting Social Security.”

Parmelee is among the millions of Americans now bearing the financial cost of the Social Security Amendments of 1983, which were designed to help stabilize the program’s finances as the surplus in its trust funds dwindled. Among other provisions, the law gradually raised the full retirement age (FRA) from 65 to 67, starting in the early 2000s.

FRA is the age at which you can claim 100 percent of the Social Security benefit amount as determined by your lifetime earnings. Claiming before you reach it permanently reduces your monthly payments.

Since Parmelee applied for her benefit at age 64, nearly three years shy of her Social Security FRA, her monthly payments were permanently reduced by about 20 percent. Had the retirement age remained at 65, her reduction would have been less than 7 percent.“You work hard, you have these minimal vacations, you plan carefully and then you get hit,” she says.

A woman leans on a white chair, looking out an open window of a house.

Janet Parmelee looks out the window of her home in East Haven, Connecticut. The former nurse had to retire early, and take a significantly reduced Social Security benefit, to care for her husband after he was diagnosed with dementia.

Jackie Molloy

‘It’s a big threat’

Now, with Social Security’s trust funds again running short, some are floating the idea of raising the retirement age again, to reduce what the system spends on benefits. Washington-based think tanks have called for lifting the FRA to 69 or 70, arguing that Americans are living longer and retiring later. Lawmakers have chimed in too.

“It’s a big threat,” says Bill Sweeney, AARP’s senior vice president for government affairs. “It is one of the things that almost everyone talks about.”

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The 1983 law raised the retirement age gradually, starting at 65 and 2 months for people born in 1938 and increasing incrementally to 67 for people born in 1960 and later. Congress would likely take a similar tack this time, Sweeney says, meaning the impact would again fall on younger and middle-aged workers, not current or near retirees.

“They would apply it to people who don't think of themselves as part of the Social Security coalition — to young people, to Gen Z, to Gen Alpha, maybe even to some of the younger millennials,” he says. “This would happen without them even realizing that they had a stake in this, which is why we're so focused on making sure that young people understand how important this fight is for their economic futures,” he adds.

The prior FRA increase, along with other changes enacted in 1983, resulted in an estimated 19 percent benefit cut for current and prospective retirees alike, according to a 2011 analysis published by the National Academy of Social Insurance.

If lawmakers now raise the retirement age to 70, Sweeney says, “today’s workers would get 21 percent less than the amount they would otherwise get in Social Security, which is already 19 percent less than their parents and grandparents got. That’s why AARP is fighting to make sure we don’t double down on this mistake again.”

Most retirees claim early

Parmelee is hardly alone in retiring earlier than planned. A recent survey by the Employee Benefit Research Institute found that nearly half of workers leave the labor force sooner than anticipated. Of that group, 3 in 4 said it was due to something beyond their control, such as a health problem, job loss or caregiving responsibilities.

Tracey Gronniger, managing director of economic security at the nonprofit advocacy group Justice in Aging, says many people in physically demanding jobs simply cannot work until they are 67, let alone 70, and people who lose jobs later in life often face age discrimination if they try to find a new position.

Claiming retirement benefits at 62, the minimum eligibility age, permanently reduces monthly payments by as much as 30 percent compared with waiting for full retirement age. Despite the financial penalty, 62 percent of workers who started Social Security in 2025 claimed early and received reduced benefits, according to Social Security Administration data. Twenty-six percent started at 62.

Depending on how it is implemented, raising the FRA to 70 would increase what Social Security calls the “reduction factor” for people claiming at 62 from 30 percent to nearly 50 percent, according to estimates by Elisa Walker, an AARP government affairs director. So if a person’s full benefit amount is $2,000 a month at FRA, their payments could be as little as $1,100 if they claim at 62.

That’s less of a concern for more affluent Americans who can afford to wait to claim Social Security, Gronniger says, but people in low-wage jobs often don’t have the option of dipping into a 401(k) or other retirement account to keep them afloat after exiting the workforce.

That makes raising the retirement age most harmful “to people who can least absorb that loss,” Gronniger says. Rather than incentivizing people to work longer, “it just means that people are getting less money when they do retire.” That was the case for Debbie Freece. A nurse in Ohio, she had planned to work until she was at least 67, but everything changed when her husband, a schoolteacher, had a major stroke in 2012. Struggling to juggle a part-time job leading her local nursing association with caring for her husband, she stopped working and claimed Social Security at 62.

“I was counting on my last three years of employment to up the amount I would receive in Social Security,” says Freece, who also helps care for and support her adult son, who has a developmental disability. “I feel very blessed that I have that money,” she adds, “but it could have been so much more under normal circumstances.”

Lifespans are longer, but not for everybody

Proponents of raising the retirement age say it’s a sensible step that reflects improvements in U.S. life expectancy. In 2023, the average American who reached age 65 could expect to live another 19.5 years, 3.1 years longer than in 1980, according to federal mortality data.

But those gains have been concentrated at the top of American’s socioeconomic ladder, says Joel Eskovitz, senior director of Social Security and savings at AARP’s Public Policy Institute.

For example, a 2015 National Academy of Sciences study found that among men born in 1960 who reached age 50, those in the top fifth of earners could expect to live 12.7 years longer than those in the bottom fifth. For women of similar age and income, the gap was 13.6 years. Subsequent studies have found the disparities widening, with income and education being among the best predictors of how long someone will live.

“People on the wealthier side are living longer, but lower-income people are basically living the same amount that they were decades ago,” Eskovitz says. “They won't be spending 30 years in retirement.”

Diagnosis devastates retirement plan

Parmelee says that when she started her career, “I never really thought I would retire, honestly, because I couldn't imagine myself filling my day other than with work.”

After she had kids, she reduced her schedule but still juggled two jobs, as an elementary school nurse and an in-home infusion nurse. It was only after she met her second husband, Mike Richitelli, in 2013 that she started to think about how nice it would be to retire. They paid off their mortgage and socked away as much as they could.

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“We just were really very, very careful so that we could really enjoy our retirement together,” she says. Their plans were modest: one big trip a year, more time with their six grandkids, an occasional dinner out.

Richitelli retired from his electrical engineering job in 2021, as planned, at age 68. Within months, he and Parmalee found themselves in a neurologist’s office after Richitelli started exhibiting odd behaviors. The diagnosis: frontotemporal dementia.

At first, Parmalee kept working her part-time job administering in-home infusions, hoping to rack up more savings and hold off on Social Security. But Richitelli’s condition progressed quickly, and it wasn’t safe for him to be on his own.

“We didn't have one day of retirement together without this disease,” Parmelee says. “It’s devastating.”

She says it would not be fair to ask her kids and grandkids, and their peers, to work even longer than she did. Americans need to know they will get to enjoy a little respite in the late stages of their lives, she says. Social Security’s problems need to be addressed, she adds, but “there’s got to be a better way to do it than taking people's benefits away.”

Deirdre Shesgreen is an AARP writer and editor covering Social Security. She previously worked as a state news editor for the AARP Bulletin and as a reporter and editor at USA Today, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and other publications.

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