Retirement stops being a date: 35% of workers have pushed the year back

Thirty-five percent of U.S. workers say their expected retirement age has moved later over the past three years, against 13% who now expect to retire earlier ^[1][4]. That is the sound of a fixed milestone turning into a floating variable, and it matters because the same survey finds 51% of workers either behind on retirement savings or not saving at all ^[6].

The numbers come from the Retirement Reality Gap Report by MyPerfectResume, a resume-building service, based on a national survey of 1,000 U.S. workers ^[3]. Treat the provenance accordingly: this is a vendor survey, and the published summary describes the sample only as a national survey of 1,000 workers ^[3]. The direction of travel is still worth reading.

The ratio is the finding. Delayers outnumber accelerators roughly 2.7 to one ^[1]. Strip out the 52% whose timeline has not moved and you are left with about 48% of workers whose expectations changed at all, of whom roughly three in four moved the date out ^[2][4]. When a plan revises, it revises later.

Where it lands: 27% expect to retire between 65 and 69, 21% between 60 and 64, 17% between 50 and 59, 14% at 70 or older, 14% not at all, and 7% before 50 ^[13]. That puts 55% at 65 or later including the never-retirees ^[5], and 28% expecting to work into their seventies or indefinitely ^[4]. The stated cause is not lifestyle preference. Cost of living is the top barrier by a wide margin at 64%, ahead of insufficient income at 37%, insufficient savings at 34%, healthcare costs at 31%, and housing and debt at 30% each ^[8][9].

Two of the figures sit awkwardly together and are the most useful part of the dataset. Twenty-four percent of workers expect to retire before 60 ^[14], while 51% say retiring before 60 is not realistic for someone with a typical full-time job ^[11] - a 27-point gap between what a cohort expects for itself and what the same population believes is achievable ^[3]. Some of that gap is high earners who genuinely can. The rest is a plan that has not yet met its spreadsheet.

The savings distribution is close to evenly split: 34% behind, 17% not started, 33% about on track, 16% ahead ^[6][7]. Confidence tracks it, with 32% not confident they will be able to fully retire ^[10], and 71% saying early retirement through aggressive saving and investing is unrealistic for most people or only realistic for high earners and wealthy households ^[12]. Dr. Jasmine Escalera, career expert at MyPerfectResume, framed it as workers "actively revising their timelines" rather than merely worrying ^[15].

For operators the consequence is workforce composition, not sentiment. If 28% of workers expect to be working past 70 or forever ^[4], headcount planning, benefits design and healthcare cost assumptions all shift, and the retirement-driven turnover that employers quietly rely on for promotion slots arrives late or not at all.

What to watch: whether the delay figure moves again in the next wave of this or comparable surveys, and whether the 17% who have not started saving shrinks; and whether the 14% who do not expect to fully retire hardens into a permanent segment rather than a stress response to current prices ^[1][6][5].