Sweden has raised its retirement age to 68. It has also sent a government-issued handbook on surviving AI job displacement to every one of its 4.2 million working-age citizens. 

Retirement age data covering approximately 100 countries, sourced from Wikipedia as of 2026, places Sweden’s 68 in its global context. 

Only Denmark goes further, with a 69-year-old statutory retirement age for both men and women, the highest in the dataset. 

TL;DR

• Global retirement age data covering approximately 100 countries shows a 14-year gap between the world’s lowest (Sri Lanka, 55) and highest (Denmark, 69)
• Most of Western Europe is stuck at 65, the age set as a global standard in 1935
• A clear gender gap persists in retirement ages across Iran, China, Russia, and Venezuela, with women retiring years before men.

What the Full Global Picture Shows

The largest single cluster of countries in the dataset sits at 65 for both sexes.

That number traces back to the U.S. Social Security Act of 1935, which set 65 as the retirement threshold and exported that standard globally. 

Life expectancy in most of those countries has since risen by 10 to 15 years. 

In many cases, the retirement age has not changed.

The United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia all sit at 67, a level Sweden has now passed.

The Gender Gap That Maps Political Culture

One of the dataset’s most revealing patterns has nothing to do with age. It has to do with the gap between men and women.

Iran, North Korea, Oman, Uzbekistan, and Venezuela all require men to retire at 60 and women at 55, a five-year gap baked into law. 

China retires men at 63 and women at 57. Russia sets the retirement age for men at 65 and for women at 60, a gap that survived the country’s deeply unpopular 2018 reform. 

Colombia, Vietnam, and Turkey all maintain years-long differences between male and female retirement ages.

Two Countries Worth Watching

South Korea has a retirement age of 60 for both men and women, one of the lowest among major developed economies.

It also has the world’s lowest birth rate, recorded below 0.8 births per woman in recent years. 

A collapsing working-age population supporting retirees who leave the formal workforce at 60, while average life expectancy sits near 84, is not a sustainable arithmetic. 

China’s retirement ages of 63 for men and 57 for women were designed in the 1950s for a manufacturing economy where people did not live long enough to collect pensions for two decades.

Chinese women now have an average life expectancy of nearly 79 years. 

Retiring at 57 means spending more than 20 years in retirement, a cost the Chinese pension system was not built to carry. 

Although it’s worth noting that China has announced gradual reform.

ELI5 

Most countries make people work until they’re 65 or 67 before they can retire and collect a pension. Sweden just changed its rules so that people must work until age 68, which is among the highest ages in the world. Only Denmark is higher, at 69. Sweden also gave every working adult a booklet about how to deal with AI taking over jobs. The two things together mean: work longer, and good luck with the robots.

Source: 

Wikipedia, Retirement Age by Country (as of 2026) | Sweden Government