Two in five Luxembourg retirees leave workforce before collecting pension

Under 60% of people retiring in 2024 were in full-time employment before collecting a pension, the latest data by the health and social security ministry showed, as Luxembourg is trying to mend its creaking pension system.

The government’s 2025 General Report on Social Security, published in mid-January 2026, includes five-year data up to the end of 2024. The new report reveals that 59.2% of the 9,655 individuals who officially retired in 2024 moved into retirement from being economically active in Luxembourg – either self-employed or as wage earners.

The number of people retiring in 2024 was over a thousand higher than 2023 and has risen every year. In 2020, for comparison, 7,081 people retired. The average age of 2024 retirees (61.4 years) was, however, higher than the previous five years, at roughly a month older than those who retired in 2023.

Luxembourg’s pensions system is a perennial talking point and its reform one of the government’s greatest challenges, as the country attempts to keep the pot topped up as the population demographic tilts ever older.

Pension reform announced in 2025 was roundly criticised as a tool to delay the money running out, rather than solving the problem through structural reform. The government has acknowledged that the reform has bought an extra four to six years before the balance tips into a deficit once again.

While roughly six in ten retirees in 2024 were in full-time employment before collecting a pension, the situation of the remaining 40.8% is less clear in the report.

For example, 12.5% were considered to be economically inactive but were still contributing to the pension fund. Most of them (60%) were considered to be in ‘pre-retirement’ (préretraite), which is a scheme whereby people aged 55-65 who have worked more than the minimum time required for full pension eligibility can cut back to part-time and have their incomes topped up by the government. People in pre-retirement are not counted in statistics as retired or unemployed, but also not as economically active.

Some were receiving unemployment benefit, while others retired from so-called indemnité (professionnelle) d’attente – a form of benefit that bridges the gap to retirement after unemployment benefit entitlement runs out. Finding a new job after becoming unemployed is recognised to get harder with age and especially affects people in the last decade of their working lives.

The report does not break down the figures for inactive persons any further, and the section also includes people off work due to ill health.

The remaining 22.9% were classified as “non‑insured”, which means they were not connected to the Luxembourg jobs market in the months before their retirement. The vast majority had worked in Luxembourg but did not live in the country.

The report does not specify how many of them were employed in their country of residence at the time of official retirement. It also does not specify the reasons those people left employment in the Grand Duchy. Some could have been made redundant, while others might have left for new jobs in other countries.

“Over the past 15 years, the share of people ‘out of activity’ before retirement has remained relatively stable (with a slight decrease), while the proportion of ‘non‑insured’ retirees has fallen by more than ten percentage points,” the ministry of health and social security told the Luxembourg Times in an email.

The annual social security report covers five-year data to the end of the preceding calendar year. 2023 data was released in November 2024. The 2025 report (with data up to 2024) was delayed until January 2026, however.