A third of middle-class workers plan to skip retirement

The middle-class retirement plan increasingly has no retirement date: a Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies survey of 7,600 adults earning $50,000 to $200,000, released Thursday, found a third of respondents do not plan to retire at all, women in greater numbers — even as nearly half of those already past retirement age say they stopped working too early.

The strain behind that answer is visible in the money questions, where about 40% of respondents have cut expenses, 34% have dipped into savings, and 9% have missed a rent or mortgage payment — a sequence that suggests a cohort solvent but stretched. Roughly 40% of the full sample describe themselves as stressed and having trouble making ends meet, a share that approaches half among women, while more than 80% still say they feel positive about their lives.

Catherine Collinson, CEO of the Transamerica Institute and the center, frames the result as perseverance: middle-class Americans need to afford everyday life, have income to save, and hold meaningful employment. The gender data complicates that picture: women are less likely than men to put retirement saving ahead of daily costs, and nearly twice as many women as men say they left the workforce early for family-related reasons. Their parents' generation had government- and employer-funded pensions to rely on; this one is being asked to rely on a longer working life.

The survey arrived the same day as the report that middle-class savings are being outrun by debt, with the median middle-class household holding $64,000 in retirement accounts. Transamerica's contribution looks ahead: a third of middle-class workers expect to keep working, and many older workers who already retired think stopping was a mistake. For sponsors, those two findings point in the same direction.

That is the workforce fit that this publication has argued should anchor target-date due diligence: fees and performance matter, but a glidepath built around a retirement age a third of middle-class earners say they will never reach is mismanaging a large cohort's money. The fix is plan design that treats retirement as a phase, not a date — automatic escalation that keeps climbing past 65, income features that start when the participant actually leaves, and default settings that recognize the family-related retirements women report at nearly twice the rate of men.

A plan that still assumes 65 for every participant is building its menu around a milestone a third of the middle class has already abandoned, and that mismatch is the part sponsors can fix.