Raising the State Pension Age to 68 Punishes the Workers Who Built This Country

Advocates of a higher pension age love to cite life expectancy at birth: 78.6 for men, 82.6 for women. Those averages are meaningless for this debate.

What matters is healthy life expectancy — the years people can expect to live in good health. For men across the UK, it's just 62.8 years. For women, 63.6. Both figures are below the current pension age of 66.

That means the average British man already spends 3.2 years of his working life in poor health before reaching pension age. Raise it to 68, and that becomes 5.2 years — five years of dragging yourself to a job while managing chronic pain, heart disease, diabetes, or depression.

The regional picture is devastating:

Men in the South East enjoy healthy life expectancy of 65.5 years. Men in the North East: 59.1 years. That's a 6.4-year gap. A pension age of 68 means a retired banker in Surrey collects his pension after a few years of golf, while a retired steelworker in Redcar has already spent nearly a decade too ill to enjoy his.

The entire case for raising the pension age rests on the assumption that people keep living longer. They've stopped.

ONS data shows life expectancy improvements stalled around 2011 — well before COVID-19. Life expectancy at birth fell by 38 weeks for men and 23 weeks for women between 2017-19 and 2020-22. The latest estimates are back to 2010-12 levels.

This isn't a temporary blip caused by the pandemic. The slowdown started a decade earlier. Austerity-era cuts to public health, social care, and the NHS have real consequences. The UK now has one of the worst life expectancy trends among comparable European countries.

Linking pension age to longevity makes some theoretical sense — but only if longevity actually increases. Right now, we're raising the pension age while life expectancy falls. That's not prudent fiscal management. That's taking money from the dead.

The government's own State Pension Age Review acknowledged that life expectancy projections had been revised downward. Yet the policy trajectory hasn't changed. We're still planning as if people are going to live to 90, when the data increasingly suggests they won't even reach the averages we assumed a decade ago.

For context on how retirement income works in practice, our pensions hub covers the full range of options — from state pension to drawdown to annuities.

"People should just work longer" assumes employers want them. The reality is brutal.

Age discrimination in hiring is technically illegal and practically endemic. Workers over 55 who lose their jobs take an average of six months longer to find new employment than younger workers. Many never do. They end up on Universal Credit — at a lower rate than the state pension — waiting years for their pension age.

For those still employed, the picture isn't much better. Older workers in retail, hospitality, and care face physically demanding work that their bodies increasingly can't handle. A 66-year-old stacking shelves isn't the same as a 66-year-old in a boardroom.

The government talks about "extending working lives" as though this is a lifestyle choice. For millions of people in manual and service jobs, it means pushing through chronic pain because the alternative is poverty. Visit our savings guide — the median pension pot for 55-64 year olds outside the public sector is barely enough to supplement three years of state pension, let alone bridge a two-year gap.

The irony is thick: the same government that wants people to work until 68 has presided over a decade of flat productivity growth that has suppressed the wages these workers need to build private pension pots. Those approaching retirement with small workplace pensions face a double squeeze — work longer and retire on less. Our analysis of annuity rates in 2026 shows what a modest pension pot actually buys — and it's not enough to bridge a two-year gap.

Raising the state pension age saves the Treasury money. Who pays for those savings?

Not wealthy professionals. They have private pensions, ISAs, and savings — they barely notice the state pension anyway. For higher earners, the £230.25 per week is nice to have, not essential.

The people who depend on the state pension are those with the smallest private pots: women who took career breaks for caring, manual workers whose employers offered only basic workplace pensions, self-employed workers who never had employer contributions. These are exactly the groups most likely to be in poor health by their mid-60s.

Raising the pension age is a regressive policy dressed in progressive clothing. It costs the poorest two extra years of income they desperately need, while saving the richest a trivial amount of tax they'd barely notice.

For context on how the tax system treats pension savings — including the £60,000 annual allowance that overwhelmingly benefits higher earners — see our tax guide.

The personal allowance of £12,570 has been frozen since 2021. As the state pension rises with the triple lock, an increasing number of pensioners are being dragged into income tax — the full new state pension of £11,973 is now just £597 below the personal allowance. By the time the pension age reaches 68, the state pension may well exceed the personal allowance entirely, meaning even the poorest pensioners will pay tax on it.

If you're nearing retirement and trying to maximise your ISA allowance before April 5, that urgency makes the pension age debate even more personal — every pound sheltered from tax matters more when the state pension itself becomes taxable.

The fiscal challenge is real — state pension spending is the largest item of government expenditure. But blunt pension age increases are the laziest response.

Better options:

Means-test the state pension for the wealthiest retirees. Someone with a £500,000 pension pot and a £1 million house doesn't need £230.25 a week from the state. Tapering the pension for those with retirement incomes above, say, £40,000 would save billions without affecting anyone who actually depends on it.

Reform the triple lock. Linking pension increases to a smoothed average of earnings and inflation — dropping the arbitrary 2.5% floor — would slow cost growth without cutting anyone's pension in nominal terms.

Invest in preventive health. If the problem is that people can't work until 68 because they're too ill, then spending on public health returns more than it costs in extended working lives. Every £1 spent on smoking cessation returns an estimated £10 in healthcare savings and productivity.

Offer flexible pension access. Let people take a reduced state pension from 63 or 64, with the full rate kicking in at 66. This protects those in physical jobs while maintaining the full-rate incentive for those who can work longer.

None of these are perfect. All of them are fairer than a blanket increase that treats a hedge fund manager and a hospital cleaner as identical.

The missing National Insurance years issue compounds the unfairness. Workers who took time out for caring or illness already face reduced pension entitlements. Pushing the age to 68 means they wait even longer for a pension that's already lower than the full rate.

The fiscal challenge is real. But fiscal challenges are political choices, not natural laws. We choose how to fund an ageing society — through broad-based taxation, wealth taxation, or by asking the poorest pensioners to work two more years. The last option is the easiest for politicians and the worst for the people it affects.