---
title: Half of Japanese Aged 65 to 69 Work. Only Korea Comes Close
description: Japan's labor ministry reads other countries' youth and older-worker policies. At 65 to 69, Japan leads at 54.9%, France trails at 11.6%. What to borrow.
image: https://nobusato.jp/hubfs/covers-2026-10/age-employment-policies-compared-cover-en-2026-10.png
---

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[日本語](https://nobusato.jp/ja/blog/age-employment-policies-compared)[English](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/age-employment-policies-compared)[中文](https://nobusato.jp/zh/blog/age-employment-policies-compared)

Japan by the Numbers

In this article

1. [Who is in the 54.9%?](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/age-employment-policies-compared#s1)
2. [Where Japan sits among seven countries](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/age-employment-policies-compared#s2)
3. [Youth policy comes down to who pays for training](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/age-employment-policies-compared#s3)
4. [Older workers: abolish retirement, delay the pension, or oblige the employer](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/age-employment-policies-compared#s4)
5. [What to take into a Japan entity's own rules](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/age-employment-policies-compared#s5)

[Japan by the Numbers](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/tag/japan-by-the-numbers)

# Half of Japanese Aged 65 to 69 Work. Only Korea Comes Close

How Japan's ministry reads other countries

[Nobu Sato](https://nobusato.jp/en/profile?hsLang=en)10 min read

Contents5

1. [Who is in the 54.9%?](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/age-employment-policies-compared#s1)
2. [Where Japan sits among seven countries](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/age-employment-policies-compared#s2)
3. [Youth policy comes down to who pays for training](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/age-employment-policies-compared#s3)
4. [Older workers: abolish retirement, delay the pension, or oblige the employer](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/age-employment-policies-compared#s4)
5. [What to take into a Japan entity's own rules](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/age-employment-policies-compared#s5)

More than half of Japanese aged 65 to 69 are still in the labor force. Among seven rich countries, only Korea comes close. In 2024 the figure was 54.9% in Japan, 53.6% in Korea, 33.4% in the United States and 11.6% in France. At the other end of working life, Japan's youth unemployment rate, 3.9%, is the lowest of the seven. Every year Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare writes a long report on how other countries handle both ends. The 2025 edition, published in September 2026, tells you what Tokyo thinks it is doing differently, and what it may copy next.

## Who is in the 54.9%?

The 54.9% is a labor force participation rate. It counts everyone aged 65 to 69 who is either working or looking for work, divided by everyone of that age. An employment rate drops the job seekers from the top line. At this age few people are job hunting, so the two nearly coincide: Japan's statistics bureau puts the 2025 employment rate for 65 to 69 year olds at 54.5%.

For the cross-country numbers I use the 2024 OECD figures as printed in the Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training's Databook of International Labour Statistics 2026. Japan's figure comes from the national Labour Force Survey, the rest from the OECD database, with definitions on the ILO standard. Survey methods still differ, so treat a gap of a point or two as noise.

The youth number needs more care. The unemployment rate for 15 to 24 year olds divides the unemployed by the labor force of that age, not by all young people. A student who is not looking for a job is in neither the numerator nor the denominator. That is why Korea's 20 to 24 year olds have a participation rate of only 48.1%, against 76.2% in Japan: military service and university take them out of the count. It is also why Sweden shows 24.3%. Swedish students who look for part-time work count as unemployed. A high youth unemployment rate does not always mean young people are in trouble.

The ministry's report copies each country's own statistics, with different age bands, so I use it for policy and the JILPT tables for numbers.

## Where Japan sits among seven countries

In the late 60s, only Japan and Korea clear 50%. Participation at 65 to 69 is 54.9% in Japan, 53.6% in Korea, 33.4% in the US, 31.2% in Sweden, 27.4% in the UK, 21.2% in Germany and 11.6% in France. At 60 to 64, Japan still leads at 76.4%; France is at 45.2%.

Widen the band to everyone 65 and over and Korea overtakes Japan, 39.4% to 26.1%, because so many Koreans keep working into their 70s. Japan's 2025 count was 9.43 million workers aged 65 and over, 13.8% of everyone employed, and 76.1% of those who are employees rather than executives are on non-regular contracts.

Half of people aged 65 to 69 are in the labor force in two of seven countries: Japan and Korea

Top: labor force participation rate, ages 65 to 69 (employed plus unemployed as a share of population, %, 2024). Bottom: unemployment rate, ages 15 to 24 (%, 2024, denominator is the youth labor force). JILPT Databook of International Labour Statistics 2026; Japan from the Labour Force Survey, others from the OECD

JapanThe other six

**Participation rate, 65 to 69**　working or looking for work

- Japan

  54.9%
- Korea

  53.6%
- United States

  33.4%
- Sweden

  31.2%
- United Kingdom

  27.4%
- Germany

  21.2%
- France

  11.6%

**Unemployment rate, 15 to 24**　students not seeking work are outside the denominator

- Japan

  3.9%
- Korea

  6.4%
- Germany

  6.6%
- United States

  8.9%
- United Kingdom

  12.1%
- France

  18.7%
- Sweden

  24.3%

Japan's numbers are less a product of policy than something policy is chasing. Employers must keep people to 65, and are asked to try to 70.

Figure 1. In 2024 the labor force participation rate at ages 65 to 69 was 54.9% in Japan, 53.6% in Korea, 33.4% in the United States, 31.2% in Sweden, 27.4% in the United Kingdom, 21.2% in Germany and 11.6% in France, while youth unemployment (15 to 24) was lowest in Japan at 3.9% and highest in Sweden at 24.3% and France at 18.7% (JILPT Databook 2026, OECD).

## Youth policy comes down to who pays for training

Read the youth sections country by country and one question organizes all of them. Who pays to turn an inexperienced 20 year old into someone worth a salary: the employer or the state?

In Germany the employer pays. The dual system pairs classroom time at a vocational school with paid training inside a firm. The state funds the school; the firm pays for the training and the trainee's allowance, which has a legal floor of 682 euros a month from January 2025, rising to 724 euros in January 2026. Youth unemployment is 6.6%, a third of France's.

In France the state pays the employer. A firm signing an apprenticeship contract received up to 6,000 euros per apprentice in early 2023. From 24 February 2025 the aid was cut to 5,000 euros for employers with fewer than 250 staff and 2,000 euros for larger ones. Youth unemployment is still 18.7%, second highest of the seven.

Korea legislates quotas. A special act on youth employment covers unemployed people aged 29 and under and obliges public institutions to fill at least 3% of their headcount with them. The 2025 budget set aside 777.2 billion won for a youth employment incentive. Unemployment under 25 is flat at 6.4%.

Japan has no program with a name this big. It has a habit instead: companies hire new graduates in bulk each April and train them inside the firm. The employer pays for training, as in Germany, without the exams or the national certificates. I wrote about the mechanism in [Japan's 98% graduate employment rate: check the denominator](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/japan-graduate-employment-rate?hsLang=en). That habit is the main reason youth unemployment is the lowest of the seven.

A foreign company that hires only experienced mid-career people in Japan stands outside this habit. It buys people someone else trained, and the training is priced into their salaries. That is one reason Japanese labor looks cheap on paper and less cheap once you hire.

## Older workers: abolish retirement, delay the pension, or oblige the employer

The United States barely has a concept of retirement age. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 bans discrimination against workers aged 40 and over. The one older-worker program the report describes is SCSEP, which gives low-income older people part-time community jobs at minimum wage.

The United Kingdom abolished the default retirement age in April 2011, when regulations removed the exemption that had let employers dismiss people simply for reaching 65. The government's guidance now says that default retirement age "no longer exists." The state pension age rises to 67 in 2028. Even so, employment at 65 and over was 12.7% in 2025, much of it zero-hours or part-time according to the report.

Germany moves people with the pension. The standard pension age is rising from 65 to 67 in steps between 2012 and 2031; anyone born in 1964 or later retires at 67. From January 2023 earnings limits for early pensioners were removed entirely, and from January 2026 the Aktivrente exempts up to 2,000 euros a month of salary from income tax for employees who keep working past the standard age. The design rewards the work, whatever the age.

Korea looks most like Japan. A 2013 amendment made a minimum retirement age of 60 compulsory, from 2016 for employers with 300 or more staff and from 2017 for everyone. Korea's 39.4% participation at 65 and over could mean older Koreans are able to work, or that they cannot afford to stop. The number alone does not say which.

Japan obliges the employer. The Act on Stabilization of Employment of Elderly Persons requires any company with a retirement age under 65 to take one of three measures: abolish retirement, raise the age, or offer continued employment. A transitional rule that let firms screen who got continued employment expired on 31 March 2025, so from fiscal 2025 everyone who wants to stay to 65 must be kept. Keeping people to 70 has been a duty to make efforts, with no legal force, since April 2021.

The ministry's count as of 1 June 2025, covering 237,739 companies with 21 or more regular staff, shows what that produced. 99.9% have a measure to 65: 65.1% use continued employment, 31.0% raised the retirement age and 3.9% abolished it, and 62.2% of companies still set retirement at 60. Measures to 70 are in place at 34.8%, with large firms lagging at 29.5% against 35.2% for smaller ones.

Put the countries side by side and the 54.9% changes meaning. Other governments move individuals, with pensions and anti-discrimination law. Japan places the obligation on companies. The high number looks less like an achievement of policy than policy running behind two facts: pensions that do not cover living costs, and a labor shortage that makes 66 year olds worth keeping.

## What to take into a Japan entity's own rules

When a foreign company writes the retirement clause in its Japanese work rules, there are two conventional choices: retire at 65, or retire at 60 with continued employment to 65. You can also do the American thing and set no retirement age. Then you lose the natural moment to reset role and pay, and need to reset them by role and evaluation instead. I set out that logic in [Three-track pay: set grade, allowance and bonus separately](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/method-pay-tracks?hsLang=en).

Choose 60 plus continued employment and you inherit the Japanese habit of cutting pay at 60. I went through that in [Rehired at 60 in Japan: Pay Cuts and Role Redesign](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/rehired-after-retirement-age?hsLang=en). If the cut is not explained by a change in the job, you get a motivation problem and an equal-pay problem at once. The Aktivrente idea is simply that age does not set the pay. The Japan-entity version is to decide in advance that someone whose role has not changed at 65 keeps the same pay.

On the youth side, skipping graduate hiring means paying for training through recruiting fees and mid-career salaries instead. Somewhere around 20 people, whether to take a few graduates and train them becomes a decision about the structure of your payroll.

The 2025 edition also has a chapter on China. How Japan's government summarizes your home country's labor rules is roughly how your Japanese customers and regulators picture it. I read the whole report as a trailer for the next amendment. If the duty to try to keep people to 70 ever becomes a hard obligation, the argument is probably already written in the Korea or Germany chapter.

Sources (as of October 2026)

- [Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, 2025 Overseas Situation Report (海外情勢報告, published September 1, 2026), Part 1 labor policy chapters on the United States, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Korea](https://www.mhlw.go.jp/stf/toukei_hakusho/kaigai25.html)
- [JILPT, Databook of International Labour Statistics 2026, Table 2-11-2, labor force participation rates by age (2024, OECD)](https://www.jil.go.jp/kokunai/statistics/databook/2026/02/d2026_2T-11-2.pdf)
- [JILPT, Databook 2026, Table 4-3, unemployment rates by age group (2024, OECD)](https://www.jil.go.jp/kokunai/statistics/databook/2026/04/d2026_4T-03.pdf)
- [Statistics Bureau of Japan, Statistics Topics No.149, Japan's elderly as seen in statistics (September 2026)](https://www.stat.go.jp/data/topics/pdf/topics149.pdf)
- [Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, 2025 Report on Employment of Older Persons (as of June 1, 2025)](https://www.mhlw.go.jp/stf/newpage_66853.html)
- [Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, amendment of the Act on Stabilization of Employment of Elderly Persons (work to age 70)](https://www.mhlw.go.jp/stf/seisakunitsuite/bunya/koyou_roudou/koyou/koureisha/topics/tp120903-1_00001.html)
- [U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Age Discrimination (ADEA)](https://www.eeoc.gov/age-discrimination)
- [UK, The Employment Equality (Repeal of Retirement Age Provisions) Regulations 2011](https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2011/1069/made)
- [GOV.UK, Retirement age](https://www.gov.uk/retirement-age)
- [Deutscher Bundestag, Drucksache 21/2984, Aktivrentengesetz (government bill)](https://dserver.bundestag.de/btd/21/029/2102984.pdf)
- [JILPT, overseas labor information, Korea: mandatory retirement age of 60 (June 2013)](https://www.jil.go.jp/foreign/jihou/2013_6/korea_02.html)

---

Author

[Nobu Sato](https://nobusato.jp/en/profile?hsLang=en)

Launching in Japan, starting with people and systems. I write about building organizations, sales teams and technology organizations in Japan, in English, Japanese and Chinese.

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