One in three American workers has quietly moved their retirement target further into the future, and the math behind that shift is straightforward: housing, healthcare, debt, and family obligations are consuming the dollars that would otherwise flow into a 401(k). A MyPerfectResume survey of roughly 1,000 US workers conducted in May found that 35% had pushed back their planned retirement age within the past three years alone, and 14% said they do not expect to fully retire at all. This is not a lifestyle preference. It is a financial-pressure signal with real consequences for workforce planning, benefits design, and individual career decisions across every industry.

For workers, the shift changes how you should think about the next decade of your career. For HR and benefits leaders, it reframes retention: financial security is now the workforce-stability story, not just a salary-band conversation.

What the numbers actually say

The MyPerfectResume data reveals a workforce split almost evenly on retirement readiness. Fifty-one percent of workers said they are behind on retirement savings or have not started at all, while 49% said they are on track or ahead. That 51% is not a fringe group. In any given team meeting, it is roughly half the people in the room.

The delay is substantial, not marginal. Fourteen percent of surveyed workers now expect to retire at age 70 or older, and another 14% expect never to fully retire. Among Generation X workers, who are closest to traditional retirement age and have the least runway to correct course, a separate Zety report found that 19% do not expect to ever step away from work entirely. Under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), which governs private-sector 401(k) and defined-benefit plans, workers over 50 can make catch-up contributions to tax-advantaged accounts. The IRS set the 2026 standard 401(k) contribution limit at $23,500, with a catch-up allowance of $7,500 for workers aged 50 and over, and a higher catch-up limit of $11,250 for those aged 60 through 63 under the SECURE 2.0 Act provisions that took effect for plan years beginning in 2025. For the 51% who are behind, those limits represent the maximum legal lever available, but they are only useful if the income is there to deploy them.

Workers cited a stacked list of reasons for delaying: cost of living, insufficient earnings, low savings, healthcare and housing costs, debt, economic uncertainty, and supporting family members. Each one is a competing claim on the same paycheck.

Why the shortfall keeps widening

Jasmine Escalera, a career expert at MyPerfectResume, described the core mechanism directly:

Retirement challenges are connected to workers' immediate financial obligations. Money that could potentially be directed toward retirement accounts may instead be needed for housing, healthcare, debt payments, family support, and everyday expenses.

Escalera also identified the compounding dimension of the problem:

Workers can't always solve a retirement savings shortfall by cutting expenses, especially when essential costs continue to consume a large portion of their paychecks. But the longer workers go without saving enough, the more difficult it can become to close the gap.

A separate Bank of America workplace benefits report found that employers are underestimating the day-to-day financial struggles of their workforce. That gap between what leadership assumes employees are managing and what employees are actually juggling is precisely where retention risk accumulates invisibly. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Employment Cost Index tracks compensation trends nationally, but it does not capture the personal-balance-sheet strain that sits below the wage-growth headline, which is where much of this pressure lives.

For employees: what to check this quarter

If you are among the 51% who are behind on retirement savings, the useful move is not to attempt a sweeping audit of your entire financial life at once. It is to answer three specific questions with real numbers attached:

• What is your employer actually matching on your 401(k), and are you capturing all of it? An employer match you are not maximizing is compensation you are leaving on the table every pay period. Under ERISA's non-discrimination rules, employer contributions vest on schedules that vary by plan, so knowing your vesting status matters as much as knowing the match rate.
• What does your benefits package include beyond the retirement account? Financial advisory services, Health Savings Account (HSA) contributions, student-loan repayment assistance, and employer-sponsored emergency savings programs have become more common since the SECURE 2.0 Act expanded employer options in this space. Few employees use all of what is available to them.
• If a raise or a role change is on the table, what does the total compensation picture look like, not just the base salary? Comparing offers on base pay alone misses the retirement-contribution differential, which compounds significantly over a five-to-ten-year horizon.

If a salary negotiation is on your near-term agenda, framing that conversation around total financial security rather than headline pay is legitimate and increasingly expected. The MyPerfectResume data gives you evidence that cost-of-living pressure is broadly felt across the American workforce, not a personal circumstance. Bring the retirement match, the healthcare contribution, and any flexibility or remote-work value into the same negotiation rather than treating them as separate, sequential asks.

For HR and benefits leaders: retention through financial security

The workforce implication is concrete. When 35% of your workforce has already pushed retirement later, and 14% expects never to fully retire, you have a demographic staying in role longer than most workforce plans currently assume. That has direct knock-on effects on succession planning, promotion velocity, and hiring volume for junior and mid-level positions. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), which represents approximately 340,000 HR professionals in the US and globally, has consistently flagged financial wellness as a growing retention driver in its annual employee benefits surveys. Benefits teams that treat retirement-plan design as a compliance checkbox rather than a talent-retention tool are likely mispricing the risk.

The Bank of America finding that employers underestimate day-to-day financial strain is the harder signal for people teams. Standard engagement surveys, including employee Net Promoter Score instruments, generally do not capture money anxiety as a discrete driver. It surfaces instead as reduced discretionary effort, delayed internal mobility decisions from longer-tenured staff, and eventually exits to competitors offering a stronger total-rewards package. WorldatWork's annual Total Rewards survey provides benchmarking data on financial wellness benefit adoption rates by industry and company size, which benefits teams can use to calibrate where their current offering sits relative to peers.

The Bank of America report also found that nearly a third of US employees, reported at approximately 29%, said they wanted their employer to offer financial advisory services. That is a concrete, relatively low-cost lever. It signals to staff that the organization understands the pressure without requiring a complete restructuring of compensation architecture.

Three practical checks for benefits and people teams:

• Audit actual plan uptake, not just plan availability. If your 401(k) match sits at a 4% employer contribution but a significant portion of staff contribute below the match threshold, you have a communication and financial-literacy problem, not a benefits-design problem. The Department of Labor (DOL) provides plan-level Form 5500 data that can help benchmarking teams understand participation rates at comparable organizations.
• Segment by generation. Generation X is disproportionately exposed here, per the Zety data. Financial-planning support aimed at workers who are 10 to 15 years from Social Security full retirement age has a materially different structure than the same service aimed at early-career staff. One-size rollouts tend to underserve the cohort with the most acute need.
• Model the succession impact explicitly. If your assumed average retirement age has slipped by two or three years across a significant share of senior staff, your workforce-planning horizon needs to reflect that shift. Promotion pipelines, graduate-hire volumes, and internal mobility targets all move when the demographic baseline changes.

The workforce-stability read

Delayed retirement is a financial-pressure signal, not a lifestyle trend, and it reshapes how long employees stay, why they stay, and what they need from work in order to remain productive and engaged. For workers, it means the negotiation conversation has to expand beyond base wages to encompass the full picture of retirement contributions, healthcare, and benefits that compound over time. For employers, it means the retention conversation has to start earlier in an employee's tenure than most benefits programs currently assume, and it has to be grounded in plan data rather than assumptions about what workers can manage on their own.

The 49% of the workforce that is on track will keep planning around a defined finish line. The other half is quietly redrawing theirs. Every organization with meaningful staff over 45 is already operating with the downstream consequences of that shift, in succession gaps, in engagement patterns, in the shape of their hiring pipeline. Whether those consequences are visible in the workforce plan is a different question, and the answer for most organizations is that they are not yet.