Retirement Age – Born in 1980 or 1981

Last updated on March 30th, 2023

Generation Y

If you were born in 1980/81 then you are classed as being part of ‘Generation Y’ which includes anyone born up until the year 2000. Retirement ages for this generation are not currently set in stone but you should be able to have a reasonable idea of when you can retire and as time goes on this will become more definitive (and we will update any changes here).

Retirement in 2048 or 2049

However, you do have a specific retirement age that you can currently base your planning on, before any other changes are announced and this is age 68, therefore giving you a retirement year of 2048 or 2049. The change to age 68 was legislated in the 2007 Pensions Act and subsequent to that it was recommended to be brought forward to those born after 1971 in the Cridland review in July 2017 (but has yet to be put into legislation officially).

In the second review of 2023 it was recommended that State Pension age increases to 69 from 2046 so you may well be caught by that if legislation is enacted.

Future Changes

So, as we say, there is still time for this to change in the future and for more legislation to be introduced. Provided you are given at least 10 years notice of the change this may happen. So your retirement age could well be increased to 69 before 2048. In fact there are likely to be a few more reviews before this time that could increase your retirement age so you will need to keep up to date with any changes. It is unlikely that it will increase any further than age 69 due to changes only being allowed once every 10 years.

The thinking for increasing retirement ages (at present) is based on the fact that the government believe that people, in order to be make the system fair, ought to spend one third of their working lives in retirement. This means that as life expectancy rates go up, so might retirement ages. But effectively even if your retirement age does increase you will still be spending the same proportion of your life in retirement than people who have retired at a younger age.

Other Pensions

When looking at retiring from personal pensions and occupational pension schemes, the situation might be different. Your occupational pension scheme will have set its own retirement age (you should check with the pension scheme administrators) and for personal pensions there is currently the option of taking your pension early – the minimum age right now is 55 but that might increase in future.

So it is likely that you can take different pension at different ages and this site aims to keep you up to date with any changes in your State pension age.