Incentives to delay retirement and retain experienced employees: The cases of Italy and Spain

Friday, Jul 11, 2025

Il Sole 24 Ore

Discusses incentives for phased retirement, active aging trends, and Spanish policies encouraging experienced workers to remain employed longer.

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[This is an automatically generated summary, for reference only]

A past incentive program for part-time work (2016-2018) aimed to facilitate a gradual exit from employment for private sector employees nearing retirement, allowing reduced hours while maintaining full-time contribution status and exempting them from corresponding contributions. A new proposal under the annual SME bill suggests a generational relay system for 2026-27, where an older part-time worker is replaced by a younger employee at a reduced cost to the company due to specific benefits. Currently, in Italy, 10.8% of pensioners aged 50-74 (712,000 people) were working in 2023, with 9.4% continuing immediately after retirement, one-third for economic necessity. Spain has implemented various strategies to encourage experienced workers to remain employed longer, including raising the legal retirement age to 67 by 2027 and offering incentives for delaying retirement. Measures like active and partial retirement allow combining pension payments with employment, while some companies use internal policies such as job matching or intergenerational mentoring. In Spain, around 185,000 people aged 50-74 continued working in the six months following their first pension payment in 2023, motivated by economics for 18.8% and personal interest or a spouse’s employment for nearly half.

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