An elderly job seeker receives employment counseling at a job fair. (Yonhap)
SEOUL, Nov. 26 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea now has the highest employment rate among seniors in the OECD, a trend driven less by choice than by economic hardship as the country enters an era of rapid population aging.
A report released Wednesday by Oh Yoo-jin, a researcher at the National Pension Research Institute, shows that people aged 65 and older now account for 20.3 percent of the population, officially placing South Korea in the ranks of “super-aged” societies.
Yet 37.3 percent of seniors remained in the workforce in 2023—nearly triple the OECD average of 13.6 percent and far above Japan’s 25.3 percent.
Survey data suggest many elderly Koreans would prefer to keep working until around age 73. But their motivations are overwhelmingly financial. More than half cited the need to cover living expenses, compared with just 36 percent who said they worked for enjoyment.
The report points to the country’s relatively weak public pension system as the root cause. The average monthly National Pension payout last year was about 660,000 won—barely half the minimum living cost for a single-person household.
Unlike retirees in wealthier Western countries, most Korean seniors cannot rely on their pensions alone and must continue working even after benefits begin.
Compounding the strain is what researchers describe as an “income crevasse,” the widening gap between the age workers leave their primary jobs—an average of 52.9 in 2025—and the age they become eligible to receive full pension benefits, which is gradually rising to 65. Many face a decade or more without stable income.
The Era of 7 Million Working Seniors. (Image courtesy of Yonhap)
Raising the pension eligibility age may strengthen the system’s financial sustainability, the report notes, but it also pushes seniors back into the labor market out of sheer need.
At the same time, paradoxes within the system persist: retirees who earn more than 3.08 million won per month have their pension benefits reduced by up to 50 percent, reinforcing perceptions that “working penalizes you,” although the measure affects only a small share of high earners.
By contrast, the deferred pension option—which increases monthly benefits by 7.2 percent for each year payments are postponed—has encouraged some healthy seniors to delay retirement.
Past research in advanced economies has found that public pensions generally shorten working lives. But the Korean case appears to be the opposite, the report says, because benefit levels are too low to meaningfully influence retirement decisions.
With a shrinking labor force and rapidly aging population, the study argues that integrating older workers more effectively into the labor market is no longer optional but essential.
It calls for policy interventions that go beyond raising the retirement age, including efforts to prevent workers in their early fifties from being pushed out of stable jobs and to fill income gaps before pensions begin.
Japan’s system, which requires companies to secure employment for workers up to age 70, is cited as a potential model. The goal, the report concludes, should be enabling seniors to work not “to survive,” but from the foundation of a secure old age.
M. H. Lee (mhlee@koreabizwire.com)
