“When are you looking to retire?”
It may seem like a harmless question for a boss to pose to an employee, but for older workers, it can come with a coded message—it’s time for you to end your career.
“There could be insinuations, like, ‘What are you looking to do after this?’ Or, ‘how long do you anticipate being here?’” says New York-based employment lawyer Mahir Nasir, who’s had multiple older clients come to him with scenarios of getting nudged towards retirement. He’s seen this play out in various ways.
For instance, say an employee’s been working at a bank for 20 years, during which they’ve established strong relationships in the specific territory they’ve been serving. “Because [the employer] can’t really find any performance issues, but they’re concerned about the cost” of that long-time employee’s salary, Nasir says, “they will move that person out into another territory where they don’t know anybody.” Then, their performance will suffer—giving the employer an excuse to let them go.
This type of ageist discrimination is technically illegal, but that hasn’t stopped employers.
According to survey results AARP published in January, nearly a quarter of respondents ages 50 and older felt like they were being “pushed out of their jobs,” while 60% reported experiencing “subtle forms” of ageism, such as assumptions that they aren’t knowledgeable about technology or getting passed over for new training opportunities. Making matters worse for older employees who plan to keep working is that employers often believe nudging these workers toward retirement is in their best interests.
“There’s this assumption that when you hit 60 or 65, you’re looking to retire,” says Colleen Paulson, founder of Ageless Careers, where she provides career consulting to baby boomers and Gen X. However, per a poll she conducted last year on LinkedIn that garnered 2,472 responses, 26% of respondents said they didn’t ever plan to retire, suggesting that assumption no longer reflects employees’ realities.
“As we live longer, more and more people are looking to work longer,” Paulson says. But facing this type of ageism, often from long-time employers, can be so disheartening to employees that they’ll end up looking for new jobs or acquiescing into retirement anyway.
The “big red flags”
The ways employers nudge older workers toward retirement range from outright asks about post-career plans to more discreet hints that they’re no longer valued.
“They’re not being considered for promotions. They might not be considered for upskilling opportunities that other employees are being considered for,” says Carly Roszkowski, vice president of Financial Resilience Programming at AARP. Roszkowski has also heard from older employees who witness discouraging hiring patterns at their companies, where only workers in their 20s and 30s are getting job offers.
Paulson has seen this play out multiple times, having witnessed Fortune 500 companies let go of experienced talent, and then, “literally in the same week, advertise on LinkedIn that they’re hiring,” she says. With those hiring announcements, she adds, they’ll post photos of people who appear to be in their 20s, sending a clear message about the demographic they’re targeting.
While all these behaviors constitute the “big red flags” Roszkowski and colleagues tend to observe among ageist employers, quieter instances of pushing older workers to retire abound: Getting excluded from social activities with colleagues can signal to older workers that they’re no longer welcome at an organization, as can cultures where age-related comments or jokes are permitted by, or even come from, higher-ups. Employers will sometimes “use language that addresses [older workers’] speed,” says Nasir, betraying an “underlying bias associated with people…in their 50s or 60s.”
Negative changes in performance reviews or a decrease in raises that don’t line up with glowing work histories may also indicate that an employer is trying to send a hint—they don’t believe the worker is providing the value they once they did, and it’s time for them to retire.
“We’re looking to cut the biggest salaries”
False stereotypes play a large role in employers pushing older workers to retire. Those include ideas about older workers’ diminishing productivity and lack of tech savvy compared to their younger counterparts. The notion that older workers are “just waiting to retire,” says Roszkowski, means employers might think “upskilling them would not be worth the investment.”
Often, companies can hide pushing out older workers behind cost-cutting initiatives. “They can say, we were looking to cut the biggest salaries,” Paulson says, which happens to mean those employees whose salaries have grown throughout years of consistent employment.
But while “older workers might cost more,” says Roszkowski, that’s often for good reasons. Their years of experience can save organizations time and money on hiring and training new workers, which Roszkowski notes can be an expensive process—especially if it calls for frequent repetition, as younger workers tend to rotate into new jobs every few years to advance their careers.
Lately, the cost of living has been going way up, and seniors report that Social Security increases aren’t keeping pace. The economic impact of retiring before you’re ready, therefore, can mean not being able to afford basic living expenses.
Senior workers should be in “their highest income years,” Roszkowski says, but instead, they’re getting cut off early from increasingly necessary earnings.
“Document, document, document”
The federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) prohibits age-based discrimination at work for those 40 and older, including when it comes to firing, layoffs, opportunities for assignments, promotions, trainings, and benefits. “It’s unlawful…to treat somebody in an adverse, negative way on the basis of their age,” says Nasir. Consequences of not following the ADEA can include having to cough up significant fees.
Even though age discrimination claims with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission have been on the rise, experts say ageism remains very difficult to prove. “People will come to me and say, ‘They’re letting me go, and it feels like they’re letting go of everyone who’s over 50,’” Paulson says, but naming age as the common denominator can require substantial recorded evidence.
“Document, document, document,” advises Roszkowski, who also suggests sharing those documented instances of employers pushing workers to retire with HR. Reporting that you feel your employer is practicing ageism won’t go far from a legal perspective, but having a dated list of concrete instances—like a recent history of raise decreases after years of positive employee reviews—can contribute to a viable case.
However, for some older employees, the burden of fighting back, which can take years in court, may not feel worth the results of a legal win.
“Most of the people I talk with, they are just not in the mood for a five-year lawsuit over this,” says Paulson. “They want to move on with their lives.” For instance, though a jury ultimately awarded Joy Slagel $103 million in the age discrimination case she brought against her 30-year employer Liberty Mutual in 2017 (the largest win for an age discrimination case in the US, per the Los Angeles Times), the case didn’t reach a verdict until 2025.
As a result, many older workers facing their employer’s push to retire may opt for other ways out of their ageist office environment. Some of Paulson’s clients, she says, retain lawyers just to figure out the maximum severance they can get out of the situation.
Even if you do have legal standing to push back against ageism, once you’ve been treated like you don’t have any more value at your office, you’re not likely to want to keep working there. When a 70-year-old C-suite executive recently told Stacie Haller, Chief Career Adviser at Resume Builder, that her boss had been asking when she was going to retire and reassigning some of her work to younger employees, Haller suggested she contact an attorney—but she’s still helping that executive look for another job.
“She was never planning on retiring,” says Haller, “but how would you want to still continue to work there?”
Losing age diversity
By pushing older workers to retire, employers don’t only harm those workers—they also do their own organizations a disservice by depriving employees of an age-diverse workforce.
“We see that…mixed-age teams bring more innovation and more creativity, so it can help your bottom line,” Roszkowski says. They also offer wider professional networks and mentorship.
But so long as employers assume older workers want to hurry to retire, those employees aren’t going to feel welcome at their organizations.
“I would try to get out as soon as I could,” Paulson, 51, says if this were happening to her. “I have clients who are in their 60s and even 70s finding new jobs all the time—even in this competitive market.” She’d rather join their ranks than feel undervalued.
