For many, retirement means a drop in standard of living, because the pensions paid are never equivalent to the salaries received during their career. But in this European country, seniors continue to earn almost as much as when they were working.
Retirement is a source of relief for some, but also of anxiety for others. Are we going to be bored? Are we going to isolate ourselves? Will we be able to maintain our standard of living? In addition to the debates that animate the public space around the retirement age or employee contributions, the question of the amount of the pension is one of the most worrying for the French. Especially when we know that 60% of retirees receive less than a minimum wage, according to figures from the Drees in 2024.
In reality, thinking in terms of amount does not make much sense: it is the gap compared to the income we received during working life that matters the most. And especially when we compare to different countries, where living standards are very disparate. Thus, in France, you earn on average a little less than 72% of your net salary. But other countries are far ahead of us. Of the 38 OECD member states, we are only 13e in the ranking of the best pension replacement rates, a figure which testifies to “the way in which a retirement system provides income to retirees to replace their salary”. To fairly compare countries, despite radically different ways of working, the OECD adds up everything that a retiree must necessarily receive. This takes into account both pensions paid directly by the State, as in France for example, and the money set aside by companies for their employees, as in the Netherlands.
In reality, it is in Portugal that we earn the most compared to what we earned before stopping. Retirees continue to receive no less than 98.8% of their salary! Of course, Portuguese workers are significantly less well paid than the French, but this rate makes it possible to maintain purchasing power almost unchanged after retirement. In other words, the percentage is gigantic, but the final sum in euros is not necessarily higher than a French pension.
The same observation applies in Turkey (with a slight disparity between men and women) and the Netherlands, where retirees earn just over 93% of their salary. Greece, Austria, Luxembourg, Spain, Italy, Hungary, Denmark, Colombia and even Slovakia also offer pensions proportionally higher than in France, with replacement rates ranging from 90 to 72.5%.
Conversely, among OECD countries, Lithuania offers the worst remuneration to its seniors, with only 28.9% of their original salary maintained upon retirement. Among our direct neighbors like Belgium, Germany or the United Kingdom for example, the situation is also a little less favorable with respectively 60.9%, 55.3% and 54.4%. Ditto in the United States, where the pension system is fundamentally different from ours and is based mainly on individual capitalization: the pension paid by the State covers on average only 50.5% of salary income, which forces workers to put money aside throughout their career to ensure a suitable standard of living.
Ultimately, this global panorama shows that a high replacement rate remains the best shield for approaching retirement without losing one’s standard of living. If Portugal’s almost perfect score is a dream, France is still doing honorably, above the average of the OECD (61%) or the European Union (67.8%). However, even in our country, the amount of pensions differs from one department to another.
