Topical issues

As retirement ages are rising, concerns have been raised about the feasibility and social fairness of extending the working lives of those who already have long careers of demanding work. This is the theme at the webinar of the Finnish Centre for Pensions on Tuesday 14 January 2025. The webinar is in English.

Raising the retirement age has significantly delayed retirement. This has, among other things, raised the employment rate of 63-year-olds to nearly 60 per cent. Before the 2017 pension reform, only 34 per cent of people over 63 were in work.

Employees’ median monthly earnings were 3,105 euros in 2023, an increase of 4.1 per cent from 2022. Men’s median monthly earnings were over 3,400 euros and women’s over 2,800 euros, according to the Finnish Centre for Pensions’ fresh statistics on wages insured for earnings-related pensions.

The development of working lives seems moderate when examined with a new indicator from the Finnish Centre for Pensions based on the relationship between the expected duration of active working life and life expectancy. The calculation of the labour years ratio was decided in connection with the 2017 pension reform.

The earnings-related pension index will increase pensions by 1.31 per cent at the turn of the year. The wage coefficient will increase by 2.19 per cent. The index adjustments have been exceptionally large in the past two years. We are now returning to a period of moderate increases.

Are you doing research on pensions and retirement? We offer you a chance to present your work at the first ETK Pension Research Forum to a broad and international audience of pension experts, academics, stakeholders and policymakers.

This year, Finland ranked seventh in the international Mercer CFA Institute Global Pension Index comparison. Finland dropped one notch compared to 2023. In the integrity sub-index, the Finnish pension system continues to outrank the others.

In the spring of 2024, the Finnish Centre for Pensions launched a mass superivison of wages that have been reported to the Incomes Register but lack pension insurance. Light entrepreneurs were placed under the microscope.

Around 35,000 persons residing abroad receive an earnings-related pension from Finland. The number of earnings-related pension recipients residing abroad has remained constant for a long period, but there have been changes for some countries. The number of recipients residing in Sweden falls steadily while the number of recipients in Estonia grows rapidly.

There is substantial variation accross Europe regarding pensioners’ subjective economic hardship. A recent research article shows that Finland is among the countries where subjective economic hardship is relatively rare and less frequent among the over-64-year-olds than among other age groups.