43% of Americans Now Say They Expect to Work Until They Die, New Surveys Show

The numbers are ugly

More than two in five Americans, 43%, now say they expect to work until they die, according to a WalletHub survey released at the end of August 2026. Another 39% said just thinking about retirement makes them anxious. And 29% said they're counting on their own kids or relatives to support them once they can't work anymore.

The National Institute on Retirement Security (NIRS), a Washington nonprofit, released its own report on August 26, 2026, titled "Retirement Insecurity 2026: Americans' Views of Retirement." Based on a Greenwald Research survey of 1,203 adults conducted between October and November 2025, it found 80% of Americans now believe the country faces a retirement crisis, up from 67% in 2020. That's the highest number NIRS has ever recorded.

"Americans are telling us that retirement security is becoming harder to achieve as they struggle with the affordability of everyday life," said Dan Doonan, NIRS's executive director.

Debt, not laziness, is the wrecking ball

74% of respondents in the NIRS report say debt is a personal problem, and 77% say it's actively stopping them from saving for retirement. WalletHub found 53% of people say paying off debt matters more right now than putting money into a 401(k).

The barriers people cite aren't frivolous. Debt repayment tops the list at 41%, according to NIRS, followed by high housing costs (39%), unexpected emergency expenses (30%), and healthcare bills (25%). Only 13% blame a lack of access to a workplace plan. Most people aren't failing to save because they don't want to. They're failing because rent, medical bills, and minimum payments eat the paycheck first.

Gas hit a national average of $4.27 a gallon this week, up 13 cents in seven days, according to AAA. Ground beef ran $6.89 a pound in July, up 9.4% year-over-year, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics. When groceries and gas eat more of the budget, retirement contributions are the first thing to go.

The numbers on savings themselves are stark regardless of cause. NIRS found 47% of Americans have less than $100,000 saved for retirement, including 18% with nothing at all. More than half didn't start saving until after age 30. And only 9% could correctly identify how much annual income a $100,000 nest egg would realistically produce using a standard withdrawal rule, per the International Business Times UK's coverage of the same report.

The Employee Benefit Research Institute's 2026 Retirement Confidence Survey, conducted in January 2026, found worker confidence in having enough to retire comfortably slipped from 67% to 61% year over year.

The cultural shift is already visible in the labor data

About 19% of Americans 65 and older were in the labor force in 2025, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data cited by Yahoo Finance. Lawrence Samuel, a cultural historian and author of "The Rise and Fall of Retirement in the United States," told MarketWatch he believes the era of retirement-as-leisure is ending and even expects Social Security to eventually "go away" as more people simply work longer.

That's one theory. It doesn't change the arithmetic Washington actually controls.

Congress has bills. It doesn't have a fix.

Two proposals are getting attention on Capitol Hill: the Bipartisan Social Security Commission Act of 2026 (H.R. 9187), introduced in June, and the PROMISE Act (S. 4979), introduced in July, according to the Epoch Times. The first would create a 13-member commission to draft a non-amendable 75-year solvency plan. The second would direct the Social Security Advisory Board to write a 50-year plan and guarantees Congress a chance to bring it to a vote, but not a guaranteed up-or-down vote on the board's original proposal.

Neither bill fixes anything by itself. As the Epoch Times bluntly put it, if both passed tomorrow, not one Social Security check would change.

The Social Security Trustees have already laid out the math: achieving 75-year solvency today would require raising the combined payroll tax from 12.4% to 16.65%, cutting scheduled benefits by 25.2%, or some blend of both. Wait until 2032, and the numbers get worse. Congress has known this since the 1983 Greenspan Commission and the 1989 Trustees Report. Four decades of warnings, and lawmakers in both parties have still avoided the tax hikes or benefit cuts required to actually close the gap.

That's the unresolved question hanging over every one of these survey numbers: will either of these 2026 bills produce an actual vote on real changes, or will they become the fourth decade of studying a problem everyone already understands?