You’re Likely to Live Longer If You Retire After 65 (2024)

The research: Chenkai Wu, a PhD student in public health at Oregon State University, teamed up with OSU professors Robert Stawski and Michelle Odden and Colorado State’s Gwenith Fisher to examine data from the Health and Retirement Study, a longitudinal survey of Americans age 50 and over. When they looked at the sample of 2,956 people who had begun participating in the study in 1992 and retired by 2010, the researchers found that the majority had retired around age 65. But a statistical analysis showed that when people retired at age 66 instead, their mortality rates dropped by 11%.