---
title: "100,000 Centenarians: Will Working at 70 Become Normal?"
description: Japan has 107,677 people aged 100+. In 2025, 36.2% of 70 to 74 year olds worked, mostly part-time or self-employed, while male healthy life expectancy is 72.57.
image: https://nobusato.jp/hubfs/japan-centenarians-working-at-70-en.png
---

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

# 100,000 Centenarians: Will Working at 70 Become Normal?

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

![Cover showing Japan's 100,000 centenarians and the 36.2% employment rate at ages 70 to 74](https://nobusato.jp/hs-fs/hubfs/japan-centenarians-working-at-70-en.png?width=1200&height=630&name=japan-centenarians-working-at-70-en.png)

Japan now has 107,677 people aged 100 or older, the first count above 100,000. For anyone running a team in Japan, the number that matters more is 36.2%, the share of people aged 70 to 74 who were already working in 2025.

The centenarian headline invites a leap: people live longer, so they will work longer. Part of that is already true. Another part runs into a quieter statistic, healthy life expectancy, which for Japanese men sits just past 72. Work in your seventies is arriving, and it will look different from what most foreign HQs picture.

## What sits behind the 100,000 milestone

It counts people aged 100 and over on Japan's resident register as of September 1, 2026, published by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) on September 15. The total rose by 7,914 from 99,763 a year earlier, and 87.6% are women.

That is under 0.1% of the population. It tells you the tail of the age distribution is getting longer. It tells you nothing about how many 72-year-olds can handle a full working week.

## How many people in their seventies work in Japan?

Quite a lot already. According to the Statistics Bureau of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC), in a September 2026 release, the 2025 employment rate was 54.5% for ages 65 to 69, 36.2% for 70 to 74, and 12.6% for 75 and over. All three are record highs. Workers aged 65 and over numbered 9.43 million, or 13.8% of everyone employed in Japan. Roughly one worker in seven.

Now look at the denominator and the type of work. The employment rate here counts anyone who worked, including the self-employed and family workers on farms. In agriculture and forestry, 50.6% of workers are 65 or older. Among employees aged 65 and over (excluding executives), 76.1% are non-regular, and part-time work alone accounts for 52.7%.

So "a third of people in their early seventies work" does not mean a third are still in a corporate job. Most are part-time, on fixed-term contracts, or working for themselves.

Employment rate (2025, MIC)54.5%65-6936.2%70-7412.6%75+Men72.5781.05Women75.4587.0965: job guaranteed70: effort obligation60657075808590Up to healthy life expectancyHealthy to total life expectancy (2022, MHLW)

**Fig.1**Japan's 2025 employment rates were 54.5% at 65-69, 36.2% at 70-74 and 12.6% at 75+ (MIC Statistics Bureau). On the same age axis, from age 60 only: 2022 healthy life expectancy (men 72.57, women 75.45) and life expectancy (men 81.05, women 87.09), from MHLW. For men, the average healthy-life line falls in the early seventies.

## Why can't you read healthy life expectancy at face value?

Healthy life expectancy is the period lived without health problems limiting daily life. Japan's 2022 figures are 72.57 years for men and 75.45 for women, as reported in the Cabinet Office's 2026 Annual Report on the Ageing Society. Against life expectancy that year, the gap is about 8.5 years for men and 11.6 for women. The latest MHLW life table, for 2025, puts life expectancy at 81.35 for men and 87.33 for women.

Two cautions. Both figures are averages from birth. A man who has already reached 65 in good health has, on average, 19.68 more years (2025 life table), so the at-birth number undersells his runway. And healthy life expectancy is built from a household survey in which people report whether health affects their daily life. It is self-reported, and it does not measure ability to work.

Still, the chart makes one thing hard to ignore. The early seventies are where people of the same age split widely: some are fit and sharp, others are managing treatment or caring for a spouse. Any plan that treats "employees aged 70" as one group will break.

## What do Japanese employers already have to offer?

The Act on Stabilization of Employment of Elderly Persons requires employers to secure jobs up to 65. Since April 2021 it has also asked them to make efforts to secure work up to 70. That second part is an effort obligation, with no penalty. It applies to Japanese entities of foreign companies too.

MHLW's 2025 survey of 237,739 companies with 21 or more employees (as of June 1, 2025) found 34.8% had a measure in place for work up to 70. Most of it is continued employment (28.3%). Abolishing mandatory retirement accounts for 3.9%, raising the retirement age to 70 or above 2.5%, and the contract or social-contribution routes the law added just 0.1%. Meanwhile 62.2% of companies still set retirement at 60.

In practice, most of that 34.8% stretches the post-60 rehire contract further. I covered how that contract tends to cut pay without changing the job in [what happens when you are rehired at 60](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/rehired-after-retirement-age?hsLang=en). Extend it to 70 and you add health variance on top of the pay problem.

## What I would design for a Japan entity

A young foreign subsidiary can easily file this under problems for big Japanese firms. It can arrive within a few years, though, because the people hired to bring senior client relationships in Japan are often in their fifties already.

My view is that work after 65 needs its own contract design. Days and hours the person can choose and adjust. A role restated in plain words at every annual renewal, listing which responsibilities stay and which go. Handover to a successor treated as a real deliverable with a deadline. And a way to scale the role down when health changes, written in advance so nobody has to negotiate it in an awkward moment.

For individuals, the question to ask in your fifties is which parts of your work will still have a price outside your company at 70. Titles rarely survive. Client relationships, teachable skills and judgment people trust usually do. Japan's long average tenure ([Japan's employee tenure numbers](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/japan-employee-tenure?hsLang=en)) makes it easy to confuse internal standing with market value.

One thing the data cannot tell me is why the 36.2% work. The Labour Force Survey asks whether people work, and not whether they want to or need to because a pension falls short. I suspect it is a mix. The mix matters, since people who choose to work and people who must work need very different jobs from you.

Sources

- [MHLW, centenarian commemorative gifts FY2026 (Sept 15, 2026): 107,677 people aged 100+, 94,298 women, as of Sept 1](https://www.mhlw.go.jp/stf/houdou/newpage_002341.html)
- [MHLW, centenarian commemorative gifts FY2025 (Sept 12, 2025): 99,763 people aged 100+, as of Sept 1, 2025 (Japanese)](https://www.mhlw.go.jp/stf/newpage_63425.html)
- [MIC Statistics Bureau, Statistical Topics No.149 (Sept 20, 2026): employment rates 54.5% / 36.2% / 12.6% in 2025](https://www.stat.go.jp/data/topics/pdf/topics149.pdf)
- [MHLW, 2025 report on employment of older persons: 34.8% with measures for work up to 70](https://www.mhlw.go.jp/content/11703000/001609904.pdf)
- [MHLW, 2025 abridged life table: men 81.35, women 87.33](https://www.mhlw.go.jp/toukei/saikin/hw/life/life25/index.html)
- [Cabinet Office, 2026 Annual Report on the Ageing Society: healthy life expectancy 72.57 / 75.45 (2022)](https://www8.cao.go.jp/kourei/whitepaper/w-2026/html/zenbun/s1_2_2.html)
- [MHLW, 2022 abridged life table: men 81.05, women 87.09](https://www.mhlw.go.jp/toukei/saikin/hw/life/life22/index.html)

---

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