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The story
According to statistical topics released by the Statistics Bureau of Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, the employment rate among people aged 65 and over reached 26.0% in 2025, up 0.3 percentage points from the previous year. Employment rates hit record highs across every age bracket — 65–69, 70–74, and 75 and over — meaning roughly one in four people 65 or older is now working. On 5ch, opinions split between those who see the figure as evidence that more elderly people are being forced to work just to get by, and those who view it as a matter of choice — working to stay healthy and maintain a sense of purpose. The thread also sparked discussion about the rising pension eligibility age and the changing shape of Japan’s retirement system.
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The employment rate for people 65 and older is 26.0%. All three brackets — 65–69, 70–74, and 75+ — hit record highs.
Let’s start with the overall picture. According to statistical topics released by the Statistics Bureau on September 20, 2026, the employment rate for people 65 and older in 2025 was 26.0%, up 0.3 percentage points from the previous year. That means roughly one in four people 65 or older is working.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Just scrap the whole system already and cut taxes instead.
Welfare cases among young people are 7 times what they were 20 years ago.
A ¥3 trillion tax cut isn't nearly enough to let elderly people stop working.
And yet the country is still poor and in decline — think about it for a second and it's obvious whose fault that is.
Retirement used to be at 60, but the government keeps moving the goalposts because it doesn't want to pay out pensions.
It's a country where the wealthy never have to work a day in their lives, while others are still working part-time jobs at 90.
Retirement used to be at 55.
I bet that number includes people who are already drawing a pension but still working.
Life expectancy used to be shorter back then.
It's crazy that they never raised the retirement age even as people started living longer.
Apparently Namihei (the dad from the classic anime Sazae-san, drawn as an old man) is only 54.
And back then people could actually live on their pension alone — even though they hadn't paid in all that much.
Even if you're financially set, working a little — doesn't have to be full-time — helps keep your mind sharp.
You'd be better off hiking mountains than working — nobody knows how much time they've got left, so you might as well enjoy life.
Then again, back then people would drop dead pretty much across the board once they hit their 70s.
Being 55 back then meant you were already a frail old man.
These days plenty of single 55-year-old guys still think of themselves as young.
Then the moment their parents die, these guys get lonely and start hunting for a much younger wife.
This is what's now being called an 'oji attack' (an older guy's aggressive push into the dating pool for young women), and it's become a real social problem.
I want to smack him with everything I've got.
Get a job already, you useless mooch of a relative.
Same with taxi drivers — every now and then you get one who's shockingly old, like, 'this guy's gotta be over 90.'
A lot of taxi drivers earned low wages during their working years, so their pensions are small too — not enough to live on by themselves.
Low wages meant they couldn't save, and low wages meant a smaller pension — so what exactly are people in that spot supposed to do?
This country's system is broken.
People like that scare me — their view of the world is way too narrow.
Whatever taxes poor people pay doesn't amount to much of anything —
it doesn't even fully cover their own healthcare and social security costs.
Old people are half senile anyway, so elections are an easy win.
Social media is basically an idiot-manufacturing machine.
Pay influencers huge sums and it's a pyramid scheme where idiots breed more idiots.
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Rough life, huh lol
Interest rates are finally climbing again.
Maybe I'll dump ten million yen into government bonds since I've got nothing else to do with it.
Keeping all your savings in yen alone is just dumb lol
I think a lot of the bubble generation partied their money away and are now drowning in debt.
I'm from the countryside, so pitching in on more than just your day job — local community work, basically — is just normal, and I've seen firsthand how directly that ties into public safety lol
Background and Key Points of the Discussion
Retirement used to typically come around age 55, but revisions to the Act on Stabilization of Employment of Elderly Persons have since made a 60-year-old retirement age with employment secured up to 65 the norm, while the age at which pension payments begin has also been raised in stages. In the thread, opinions split between seeing the statistic as evidence that more elderly people are being forced to keep working just to make ends meet, and seeing it as a voluntary choice to keep working while still healthy — and neither explanation alone fully accounts for the trend. In practice, the rising employment rate likely reflects both a growing number of people whose pensions alone aren’t enough to live on, and a growing number of healthy elderly people who are able to keep working thanks to longer healthy life expectancy. It’s also worth noting that the growth in non-regular employment is concentrated among people in their early 70s — a reflection of the fact that post-retirement rehiring is often structured as non-regular work, which is a different phenomenon from simply ‘staying on’ as a full-time regular employee.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Breaking News Plus) thread “Employment rate for people over 65 rises to 26.0%, with the increase in non-regular work concentrated among those in their early 70s.”
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