So I often come across many articles or videos saying "X country raised the retirement age" or "X country is trying to have workers work longer and raise the retirement age to Y".
Coming from the US I've never heard of one age described as the "retirement age" (for the US). The closest universal one would be that you have to sign up for Medicare at 65. Another age is the age you qualify for "full benefits" from social security, but this depends on when you were born (they keep raising it) but is now around 66 or 67 for most people. Or the last one would be that you have to start withdrawing from your 401K at 73/75 depending on when you were born.
In fact there is a whole industry around helping people decide when they can retire. A big part of this is that for many people, relying only on social security would be a big income drop so the social security "full benefit" age doesn't seem to equal "retirement age" in the US. My mom and dad "retired" at different ages, and it wasn't "gender" based, but rather there are complex formulas of looking at how much "delaying taking Social Security" and drawing your pension (if you are lucky enough to have one), and looking at your 401K and minimum distributions, etc. And my parents aren't wealthy (my mom's a teacher so does have a pension thankfully), that sort of complex formula is really used by anyone in the middle class or higher.
In looking it up, it seems that for most countries, the "retirement age" is when you can draw full benefits from the country's "social security". I think that in most countries, "social security" provides more of an income than in the US and/or work based pensions are incorporated into the same rules so that age is more important. ( Could be wrong).
Or maybe every country is just like the US and reading and article about "X country raising the retirement age" is really just like reading "the US is raising the full social security benefit age to 67" and people don't have one "retirement age" in mind and retire at all different ages.
Just curious, because it seems like there is more of a defined and universal "retirement age" in other countries but it might totally be sample bias in terms of the media / social media I'm consuming.
TLDR – In the US the "full social security benefit" age does not equal an age that most people retire at. Is it similar in your country, or do most people retire at that age (or it's equivalent)?