While South Korea's legal retirement age is 60, middle-aged and older workers leave their main jobs at around 49 on average, leaving a gap of more than a decade between the retirement age guaranteed by law and the point of actual departure.
According to a report released on the 26th by the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs, titled "A Study on Demand-Side Indicators for Analyzing the Performance of Social Security Policies in Response to Demographic Change: Focusing on the Middle-Aged and Older Population," researchers directly analyzed raw data from a supplementary survey of the older population within the economically active population. As of 2024, the average age at which people aged 55 to 59 left their main jobs was 46.6, while for those aged 60 to 64 it was 51.6.
Statistics from Statistics Korea, which the report also reviewed, put the average age of departure from a main job among those aged 55 to 64 at 49.4. Even with different survey targets and age brackets, the results converge around 49.
The nature of these departures is far from voluntary. The leading reason for leaving a main job was restructuring, business closure and layoffs. In other words, the most common cases were people pushed out for company reasons rather than quitting on their own.
The path after leaving is a greater problem. Up to the early 50s, the shares of wage earners and permanent employees hold up relatively well. But past the mid-to-late 50s, the share of temporary and daily-hire workers and the proportion in low-skilled manual jobs swell rapidly. Careers built over more than 20 years fetch no price in the re-employment market, and workers move into positions worse than before in both income and type of employment.
The overall employment rate for the middle-aged and older population has risen from the past, but that figure alone does not reveal this downward shift. That is why the report drew a line against reading rising employment rates as a success.
The shock of being pushed out of a job spreads through an income gap into the entire foundation of daily life. The report analyzed that when people aged 50 to 64 also bear conditions such as living alone, having no income, being economically inactive, poor housing conditions and activity limitations, they become a high-risk group at effectively the same level as older adults aged 65 and over. Though they have not yet reached old age, the conditions they face are no different from those of old age.
The collapse of relationship networks is confirmed at the far end of this trajectory. Among the 3,661 people who died alone and unnoticed nationwide in 2023, those in their 50s and 60s accounted for 53.9%. Men made up 84.1% of the deaths. Houses were the most common location at 48.1%, followed by apartments at 21.8% and studio flats and officetels — studio units used as either homes or offices — at 20.7%. The figures show that in phases where loss of income and declining health overlap, the relationship networks of middle-aged men living alone are the first to break.
What the researchers took aim at was not the direction of policy but the yardstick used to measure its performance. Output indicators at the level of individual programs — counting how many people took part or how many pieces of information were provided — cannot capture the changes people actually experience. The fact that a program was carried out is different from the fact that a situation improved.
As an alternative, the report proposed intermediate performance indicators. In the employment area, it recommended replacing the overall employment rate with core indicators such as the employment-rate gap between those aged 50 to 54 and 55 to 59, differences in the share of temporary and daily-hire workers by age group, the rate of keeping a main job, and gaps in job tenure. The aim is to directly measure how much the quality of jobs is shaved off with each additional year of age.
In the area of relationships, it put forward two new indicators. One is the rate of relationship-network deficiency, meaning the share of people who have no everyday interaction at all — whether with relatives or others, whether in person or by contact. The other is the rate of lacking multifaceted support, the share of people who answered that they have no one to turn to across all three areas of emotional comfort, financial support and help with housework when ill. Rather than tallying the outcome of dying alone, the approach measures how thin relationships have grown at the stage before that.
