What's the real retirement age in America? Here are 4 guesses

Americans might be understandably confused about when, exactly, they are expected to retire.

We can claim Social Security at 62, Medicare at 65. But the "full" retirement age for Social Security is 67, and our benefits don't max out until 70.

The average American actually retires at 62, according to two respected annual surveys, from the Employee Benefit Research Institute and the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studi es .

But Boston College researchers put the average retirement age a bit higher: 62.6 for women, 64.6 for men, based on census data .

If there is an official American retirement age, in other words, good luck trying to find it.

"There isn't a retirement age," said Andrew Biggs , a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, speaking to USA TODAY earlier this year. "It's not that there's a retirement age sitting out there and we haven't discovered it. It's just that it's an ill-defined concept."

65 used to be America's retirement age. No longer

Years ago, many Americans viewed 65 as the expected retirement age. Until the 1980s, 65 was termed the "normal" retirement age for receiving Social Security . It was also the age most Americans could take Medicare , and the traditional retirement age for many pensions.

And then, the retirement math got fuzzy. In 1983, with Social Security facing insolvency, Congress passed legislation that gradually raised the full retirement age to 67. Pensions faded, and a new system of 401(k) retirement savings rewarded Americans for working longer.

Over recent decades, the average retirement age has crept steadily up. Between 1994 and 2024, the typical retirement age rose by about three years for both men and women, according to research by Alicia Munnell , senior adviser at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

Today, most Americans would be hard-pressed to identify the age when society expects them to retire.

"From a public policy perspective, I don't anticipate these retirement milestones being synced up anytime soon," said Catherine Collinson , CEO of the Transamerica Center, in an interview earlier this year.

Here are 4 milestone retirement ages in 2026

Instead of one retirement age, we'll give you four. Here are four milestone ages that define American retirement in 2026.

Sixty-two may not register as the classic retirement year: Many Americans think of it as late middle age. But it seems to be America's most common retirement age.

As we said above, two respected annual surveys consistently find that the average American worker retires at 62.