Australians are living and working longer – but not necessarily healthier, new study shows

• Australians are living and working longer, but a longer working life doesn’t always come with equivalent gains in healthy life.
• And while men and women experienced improvements in life expectancy, on average women are not gaining extra healthy life years.
• Australians are being encouraged to extend their working life.

How we found our results

• This is a longitudinal survey, meaning it seeks to interview the same households every year (about 17,000 people), enabling researchers to track life trajectories.
• We identified two age groups within HILDA’s survey sample and followed each cohort for 10 years.
• Read more:
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Differences by education

• Typically we understand life expectancies to be calculated from birth, but they can be estimated for any age.
• Our first graph shows healthy life expectancies according to school completion.
• These estimates reflect the cumulative number of years a person will, on average, be healthy or unhealthy from age 50.
• Across the two cohorts, those with low education lose 0.8 years of healthy life, while those with high education gain 0.8 years of healthy life.
• In that study, women with low educational attainment appeared to have had negligible improvements in life expectancy and lost healthy life years.

Implications for governments and employers

• When the pension was introduced in 1908, the qualifying age was 65 for men and 60 for women.
• At the time, average life expectancy for Australians at birth was about 55 for men and 59 for women.
• Now it exceeds 81 for men and 85 for women (though is considerably lower for some groups, notably Indigenous Australians).
• To achieve longer working lives, workplaces will be need become more supportive of mature-age workers, including accommodating long-term health conditions.