Retirement
Who pays for retirement
Most national pension systems are pay-as-you-go: the people working today fund the people who have stopped. That makes the arithmetic of a pension system fairly simple to see — how many retirees there are per worker, and how long retirement lasts. These are the numbers behind every argument about raising the retirement age.
Old-age dependency ratio
How many people of retirement age there are for every 100 people of working age. This single number drives more pension policy than any other: a pay-as-you-go system in which today's workers fund today's pensioners gets structurally harder to finance every time this ratio rises, which is why countries with the highest values here are the ones debating later retirement ages.
Measured in people aged 65+ per 100 working-age people. Source: World Bank Open Data (indicator code SP.POP.DPND.OL, CC BY 4.0). Latest year available: 2025. How this is sourced
| Country | Value | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Monaco | 71.7 | 2025 |
| Japan | 51.0 | 2025 |
| Portugal | 40.0 | 2025 |
| Puerto Rico (US) | 39.8 | 2025 |
| Italy | 39.7 | 2025 |
| Finland | 39.4 | 2025 |
| Greece | 38.9 | 2025 |
| Virgin Islands (U.S.) | 38.3 | 2025 |
| Germany | 38.0 | 2025 |
| Isle of Man | 37.8 | 2025 |
| Country | Value | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Qatar | 2.0 | 2025 |
| United Arab Emirates | 2.2 | 2025 |
| Zambia | 3.5 | 2025 |
| Oman | 3.7 | 2025 |
| Kuwait | 4.0 | 2025 |
| Uganda | 4.1 | 2025 |
| Chad | 4.1 | 2025 |
| Saudi Arabia | 4.2 | 2025 |
| Afghanistan | 4.4 | 2025 |
| Central African Republic | 4.5 | 2025 |
Snapshot refreshed 17 Oct 2026, 20:27 UTC. Country histories are fetched live when you select a country.
What about the statutory retirement age itself?
It is a fair question, and the honest answer is that it does not exist as a live public API the way the figures above do. The authoritative source is the OECD's Pensions at a Glance, which publishes current and future pensionable ages as a report table every two years.
Rather than copy those numbers into this page, where they would quietly go out of date the next time a country legislates a change — and several do every year — this site links you to the source itself. It is the same principle applied everywhere here: if a number cannot be fetched and dated automatically, it does not get presented as though it were live.
OECD Pensions at a Glance → (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD terms of use (attribution required)). Covers OECD and G20 countries. More on how this site handles sourcing