How Has COVID-19 Affected Older Workers’ Labor Force Participation?

Working longer helps people secure a comfortable retirement, particularly given the rise in Social Security’s full retirement age. Before the COVID-19 crisis, many older workers had internalized this message, and both retirement and Social Security claiming ages were steadily rising. The question is the extent to which the pandemic interrupted this trend. To provide a benchmark for answering this question, this brief (based on a recent study) uses the Current Population Survey (CPS) to compare patterns of leaving work and of retiring before and after the pandemic for individuals ages 55 and over.This comparison, which uses the panel nature of the monthly CPS to follow people over time, allows for identifying the factors that made older workers susceptible to job separations during the pandemic; determining whether those who left employment also retired; and reconciling these patterns with recent trends in Social Security claiming. The discussion proceeds as follows. The first section details the data and methods of the analysis. The second section shows that the pandemic did indeed result in many job exits among older workers – particularly those with less than a college degree, women, Asian-Americans, and those in occupations that did not lend themselves to remote work. The final section concludes that while the pandemic pushed many older adults out of work, it had little impact on retirement and Social Security claiming, which suggests that many might want to return to work if the pandemic continues to recede.