RTL Today - European ranking: Luxembourg has the earliest retirement age in Europe

As the pension reform debate stirs discussion in the country, RTL Infos compared the legal and effective retirement ages across Europe – and despite a legal retirement age set at 65, Luxembourg has the earliest actual retirement age in Europe.

First, a key distinction: the legal retirement age is not the same as the effective retirement age. The effective age is the average age at which people in a country actually retire. Sometimes, the gap between the two can be quite large – and that’s exactly the case in Luxembourg, where the legal age is 65, but the actual average retirement age is 59.5 years.

This is something Prime Minister Luc Frieden pointed out in parliament when he outlined the key aspects of the upcoming pension reform planned for the Grand Duchy.

Luxembourg actually holds two records: the lowest effective retirement age – 58.4 years for women and 60.5 years for men, averaging out at 59.45 years – and the largest gap between the legal (65) and effective retirement age: a difference of five and a half years.

By comparison, in Belgium, the average retirement age is 61.2 for a legal age of 65. In France, the effective retirement age is 61.5. A pension reform law that came into effect in 2023 raises the legal retirement age by three months each year until 2030, gradually increasing it from 62 to 64.

In Germany, people retire on average at 63.5, although the legal age is currently 66 years and two months. The latest retirees in Europe are the Portuguese and the Irish, with an average retirement age of 65.6 years.

According to the OECD’s Pensions at a Glance report, the average age for exiting the labour market across the EU is 62.3 for women and 62.6 for men.

You can find the legal retirement age in various European countries here.