As the U.S. has navigated the impact of inflation over the past two years, America’s senior population has been particularly affected. With most seniors out of the workforce and living on fixed incomes or retirement savings, rapidly rising cost of living has put a financial strain on older households.
Beyond inflation, however, seniors need more money than ever to live comfortably in retirement. The life expectancy of a 65-year-old in the U.S. has risen by more than four years since 1970. And while older people are living longer, seniors also face greater health issues than the rest of the population, which comes at a high cost. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services estimate that per-capita health care spending for seniors is nearly three times as high as that for the working-age population.
Amid these financial pressures, more older Americans are at risk of economic insecurity. According to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, approximately half of working households are at risk of not being able to maintain their living standards in retirement.
While most seniors have retirement benefits to rely on through Social Security and employer retirement plans, these benefits have changed over time in ways that encourage people to work longer. Changes to Social Security, including an increase in the full retirement age, larger credits for delaying retirement, and adjustments to benefit payout formulas, have led more seniors to continue working later in life. Private employers have moved away from defined-benefit pension plans in favor of options like 401(k) accounts, which depend more on employees’ contributions to their retirement accounts–incentivizing workers to keep working to contribute and save.
Faced with these circumstances, older Americans are staying in the workforce longer. The share of Americans aged 65 and older working full-time has more than doubled since the turn of the century. In 2000, just 4.2% of seniors worked full-time, while in 2021, 8.6% of the senior population did. The share of seniors working has grown even amid rapid growth in the senior population. The U.S. has nearly 23 million more seniors now than in 2000 due to the aging of the Baby Boomer generation, meaning that millions more seniors are choosing to extend their careers later into life.
Working seniors have benefited from steadily rising wages as they have become a larger part of the workforce. In inflation-adjusted dollars, the median wage for a full-time working senior has grown from $41,715 in 2000 to $55,000 in 2021. And within the last decade, the median wage for seniors surpassed the median wage for the rest of the working-age population, whose wages have largely been stagnant. Today, the typical full-time working senior earns $3,000 more annually than the typical worker aged 16 to 64.
After adjusting for cost of living, Northeastern states tend to offer higher wages for senior workers, led by Massachusetts and Connecticut, where the median senior working full-time earns more than $70,000 annually. Many of these top locations tend to have higher wages than other parts of the country generally, but senior population is also a major factor. In seven of the 10 best-paying states for seniors, the share of the population aged 65+ exceeds the national share of 16.8%. And in all but one of the top 10 states, seniors account for an above-average percentage of the total full-time workforce.
At the metro level, Northeastern locations are also well-represented on the list of best-paying locations for working seniors. Each of the top four highest-paying cities for working seniors are found in the Mid-Atlantic and New England regions of the U.S. This includes the nation-leading Washington, D.C. metro, where the typical working senior earns an adjusted wage of $73,649 annually.
The data used in this analysis is from the U.S. Census Bureau. To determine the best-paying locations for working seniors, researchers at Smartest Dollar calculated the cost-of-living adjusted median annual wage for seniors working full-time. In the event of a tie, the location with the greater unadjusted median annual wage for seniors working full-time was ranked higher. For the purposes of this analysis, seniors were considered to be age 65 and older.
The analysis found that seniors employed full-time in Georgia earn an adjusted median wage of $54,289 annually, compared to the national median for working seniors of $55,000. Here is a summary of the data for Georgia:
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Median annual wage for full-time seniors (adjusted): $54,289
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Median annual wage for full-time seniors (actual): $52,000
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Median annual wage for all full-time workers (adjusted): $52,201
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Share of full-time workforce that are seniors: 4.2%
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Share of population that are seniors: 14.7%
For reference, here are the statistics for the entire United States:
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Median annual wage for full-time seniors (adjusted): $55,000
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Median annual wage for full-time seniors (actual): $55,000
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Median annual wage for all full-time workers (adjusted): $52,000
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Share of full-time workforce that are seniors: 4.5%
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Share of population that are seniors: 16.8%
For more information, a detailed methodology, and complete results, you can find the original report on Smartest Dollar’s website: https://smartestdollar.com/research/best-paying-cities-for-working-seniors-2023
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