The 50 Jobs Where People Retire the Earliest

While some Americans remain working in certain professions long after they are eligible for retirement, the same is not true for every job. When it comes to paramedics, for example, far less than 1% of the workforce is age 66 or older. And while dentists themselves may work into their 70s, their hygienists and assistants are far less likely to do so. The same is true of police and correctional officers and service works like waitresses and bartenders.

The following graph shows the top 50 professions with the lowest rate of workers over the age of 65.

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Methodology

We examined five years of microdata from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and measured every occupation for those who were still in the labor force. There’s no one way to measure retirement with the data, since some people leave a profession for reasons other than retiring, but measuring the percentage of the workforce over age 65 was recommended by Census experts as the most accurate barometer. The rates that Americans leave the workforce in our methodology matches calculations made by other analyses.