Bar chart — Retirement age of men and women in seven European countries

The bar chart compares the average age at which men and women stopped working in seven European countries in 2012.

Overall, men retired later than women in most of the countries, Spain and France being the exceptions. Swedes of both sexes stayed in work the longest, whereas the earliest retirees were French men and Polish women.

Sweden recorded the highest figures, with men leaving work at 65.8 years old on average and women at 64.3. British men came second at 63.7, against 62.1 for women. In both of these countries, as in Italy (61.2 and 59.6), women retired about a year and a half earlier than men. The difference was smaller in Germany, at 62.3 and 61.4 years, but far larger in Poland. There, men worked until 62.4 while women stopped at just 58.7, a gap of 3.7 years that was more than double that of any other nation.

The pattern was reversed in two countries. Spanish women retired at 63.1, almost a year later than Spanish men (62.2) and later than women anywhere except Sweden. In France the two sexes were almost level, at 59.8 for women and 59.4 for men, which made French men the only male group to retire before the age of 60.