Story at a glance
- A new Pew Research Center report found that older Americans are making up a larger portion of the workforce.
- In 2023, 19 percent of U.S. adults 65 and older were employed.
- Women are making up a larger share of the older workforce.
About one in five U.S. adults 65 and older were employed in 2023, almost twice the share that worked in 1987, according to a recently released Pew Research Center report.
The report, released Thursday, also found that the older workforce has grown more racially and ethnically diverse, and that women comprise a larger share of older workers.
In 2023, women made up 46 percent of all workers 65 and older, up from 40 percent in 1987.
The share of workers in that age group who are white has declined over the same period, falling from 92 percent in 1987 to 75 percent in 2023.
Older workers have also started to earn more in recent years.
The typical worker who is 65 or older earned $22 an hour in 2022, according to the report.
Meanwhile, older workers earned an average of $13 an hour in 1987.
That increase is more significant than the bump in the earnings of workers between the ages of 25 and 64 over the same period, meaning that the wage gap between older and younger workers has narrowed somewhat over the years.
Older U.S. workers’ work schedules, benefit options and education levels are a bit different than they were in the past, which could be contributing to the group’s increasing numbers and wages.
Pew found that workers 65 and older are putting in more hours on the job on average than in past decades.
In 2023, 62 percent of older workers are working full time, while in 1987 47 percent of older workers were full-timers.
Older workers are also far more likely to have four-year degrees than in years past.
Now, about 44 percent of older workers have earned a bachelor’s degree or more, while just 18 percent had a four-year degree or more in 1987, according to the report.
This puts older workers at about the same educational level as younger workers.
Pew noted in its report that 45 percent of workers between ages of 25 and 64 hold a bachelor’s degree or higher.
Additionally, older workers are more likely to receive employer-provided benefits like health insurance and pension plans than in the past.
Among workers 65 and older, 36 percent have the option to take part in employer- or union-sponsored retirement plans. That’s a slight uptick from the 33 percent of older workers who had this option in 1987.
The same isn’t true for younger workers, whose access to employer-provided benefits has shrunk over the past few decades.
The Pew report found that in 1987, 55 percent of workers between the ages of 25 and 64 had access to retirement plans at work.
Now that number has shrunk to 41 percent.
changing america copyright.
