Percentage who later regret each choice. Bars and full ledger render below.
Career
Last reviewed 2026-04-26
Evidence quality 4.5/5
Eight-dimension review score against the
quality rubric
. Each dimension scored 1–5.
D1 Source verification
5/5
D2 Source authority & independence
5/5
D3 Regret-rate accuracy
3/5
D4 Source comparability
5/5
D5 Gilovich pattern
5/5
D6 Prose quality
5/5
D7 Caveat completeness
4/5
D8 Sample quality
4/5
Average4.5/5
Proxy data — no direct regret survey exists for this decision. Rates are derived from satisfaction scores and access-barrier data rather than questions that directly asked about regret. See caveats below.
Action regret
Retiring early
20%
20% of early retirees regret the decision
US self-reporting retired Americans
retrospective, retired 5+ years
Inaction regret
Working longer
5.0%
~5% regret retiring too late (working too long)
UK retired / semi-retired Which? members (proxy for working-too-long regret)
retrospective, surveyed May 2025
% who regret this choice
Retiring earlyWorking longer
20%5.0%
action dominates — Action dominates — most regret acting.
Related decisions
Semantically similar decisions — same territory, different trade-offs.
20% of early retirees regret their decision to stop working,
according to a MedicareFAQ survey of 569 retired Americans (“74% say
they were able to retire early, but of those who did, 20% regret that
decision”). The mirror side — regret about working too long — is much
rarer, but no US survey measures it directly, so this pair is proxy-
graded: a UK Which? survey (May 2025, n=1,188) found roughly 5% felt
they had retired too late, “half as many” as the ~10% who felt they had
stopped work too early. Even at that rough level, action (retiring
early) generates more regret than inaction (continuing to work),
reversing the typical Gilovich pattern. The reason on the action side is
almost entirely financial — 86% of the MedicareFAQ respondents wished
they had saved more, and 75% of early retirees in a separate Manulife
study said they regretted not saving enough.
Hurwitz and Mitchell (NBER Working Paper 30696, 2022) sharpen the
direction of retirement-timing regret with a controlled experiment of
1,764 Americans aged 50 and older. In their sample, 37% regretted not
working longer and 57% regretted not saving more — both point the
same way as the MedicareFAQ finding: the dominant timing regret is
retiring too early, not too late. (This 37% is NBER’s figure; the
MedicareFAQ article itself does not report a “worked longer” number.)
Börsch-Supan et al. (2023) reinforce the underlying cause: 58.5% of
those aged 60-79 wished they had saved more. Working longer is often a
proxy for the saving people failed to do, which is why “I should have
worked longer” and “I should have saved more” track together.
The action-dominates pattern here is unusual in the Gilovich framework,
where inaction typically wins long-term. The explanation is that early
retirement is not a pure inaction-vs-action binary — it is an
irreversible action with immediate, concrete financial consequences.
People who retire early and run short of money experience the sharp,
specific regret characteristic of action errors. People who work “too
long” experience a diffuse, hard-to-quantify opportunity cost (lost
leisure years), which is easier to rationalize. The low working-too-long
rate may also reflect survivorship bias: those who worked until health
failed may not be surveyed.
Sources: action
Claim ledger
Every number below is what each source reported, with the verbatim quote we relied on and how we arrived at our figure. Click any link to verify directly.
1/3 sources independently verified verbatim against the cited source
[1]MedicareFAQ — Retirement Regrets Statistics: Advice for the Next Generation
Primary study
74% were able to retire early, but of those who did, 20% regret that decision
Excerpt
“"Among survey respondents, 74% say they were able to retire early, but of those who did, 20% regret that decision. The majority (86%) wish they would have saved more before retiring, and 60% say they did not start investing in their retirement funds early enough."
”
Source data from
2024-02-19
Accessed
2026-04-26
Calculation
MedicareFAQ surveyed 569 retired Americans (online, self-selected) in January 2024. Sample: 65% female, 35% male, ages 27-90 (average 65), average retirement age 58. The archived article (Wayback snapshot 2024-11-14) states verbatim: "74% say they were able to retire early, but of those who did, 20% regret that decision" — this grounds the 20% action rate. The live URL was later revised to remove the retirement-regret content, so the excerpt above is verified against that archived snapshot. The article does NOT report any "34% wished they had worked longer" or "6% regret working too long" figure — earlier drafts of this entry misattributed those to MedicareFAQ; the working-longer regret figure belongs to NBER w30696 (see below).
[2]National Bureau of Economic Research / Hurwitz & Mitchell — Financial Regret at Older Ages and Longevity Awareness↗ 1 other entry
Peer-reviewed
37% of respondents aged 50+ regretted not working longer; 57% regretted not saving more
Excerpt
“"57% regretted not saving more for retirement, 40% regretted not purchasing Long-Term Care insurance, 37% regretted not working longer, 33% regretted not buying lifetime income payments, 23% regretted delaying Social Security benefit claims, and 10% expressed regret about financial dependence on others."
”
Source data from
2022-11-01
Accessed
2026-04-26
Calculation
Hurwitz & Mitchell, NBER Working Paper 30696 (2022, revised 2023; published in Journal of Risk and Insurance, 2025). Controlled randomized experiment of 1,764 respondents aged 50+. The full list of stated regret rates — 57% not saving more, 40% not buying LTC insurance, 37% not working longer, 33% not buying lifetime income, 23% delaying Social Security, 10% financial dependence — was verified via Knowledge@Wharton's summary of the paper. This is the sole cited source for the "wished they had worked longer" dimension; it is a regret about NOT working longer (i.e. retiring too early), which supports the action-side (early-retirement) regret, not the inaction side.
[3]Manulife John Hancock Retirement (11th Financial Resilience and Longevity Report) — Manulife John Hancock Releases New Retirement Report with Insights on Preparing for a Better 40-Year Retirement Journey
Verified
Primary study
75% of retirees who retired earlier than expected said they regretted not saving more for retirement
Excerpt
“"75% of those retiring earlier than expected reported that they regretted not saving more for retirement."
”
Source data from
2025-11-18
Accessed
2026-07-04
Verification
Excerpt independently re-fetched and confirmed word-for-word against the cited source during our grounding audit.
Calculation
Manulife John Hancock Retirement's 11th annual Financial Resilience and Longevity Report, fielded May 9-June 2, 2025 among 2,534 retirement-plan participants plus a 512-person American-retiree panel via Angus Reid, commissioned research conducted by Edelman Public Relations Worldwide Canada Inc. Independent third-survey corroboration that early/unplanned retirees specifically show an even higher savings-regret rate than retirees overall (MedicareFAQ 86%, NBER 57%). Grounds the body-text "separate Manulife study" claim.
Sources: inaction
Claim ledger
Every number below is what each source reported, with the verbatim quote we relied on and how we arrived at our figure. Click any link to verify directly.
[1]Which? — The 4 biggest retirement regrets and how to avoid them
Reference source
Around 1 in 10 felt they stopped work too early; half as many (~5%) felt they had retired too late
Excerpt
“"Around one in 10 people in our survey told us they felt they stopped work too early, while half as many said they felt they had retired too late."
”
Source data from
2025-05-01
Accessed
2026-07-12
Calculation
Which? surveyed 1,188 retired and semi-retired UK members in May 2025. "Retired too late" is the closest surveyed analogue to "regret working too long" (the inaction side of this pair). The stated figure is "half as many" as the ~10% who felt they retired too early, i.e. ~5%. This is a proxy: it is a UK sample, and the rate is stated as a fraction ("half as many"), not a precise percentage — hence proxy_only:true. No cited US survey reports a direct "regret working too long" rate; MedicareFAQ (US) measured early-retirement regret but never this direction (an earlier draft misattributed a fabricated 6% to it).
[2]PMC / Börsch-Supan et al. — Saving Regret and Procrastination↗ 2 other entries
Peer-reviewed
58.5% of the population aged 60 to 79 wished they had saved more
Excerpt
“"58.5 percent of the population aged 60 to 79 wished they had saved more."
”
Source data from
2023-02-15
Accessed
2026-04-25
Calculation
Börsch-Supan, Bucher-Koenen, Hurd & Rohwedder, "Saving Regret and Procrastination." Peer-reviewed study measuring SAVING regret only (58.5% of ages 60-79 wished they had saved more). It does NOT report a retirement-timing / working-too-long regret rate; it is cited here to establish that the dominant retirement regret is financial (undersaving), which contextualises why the timing-of- retirement inaction rate is low and why the pair is proxy-graded.
Caveats
This pair is proxy-graded. The two sides come from different surveys and even different countries, so the 20-vs-5 gap is directional, not a like-for-like measurement. The action rate (20% of early retirees regret it) is from MedicareFAQ, a self-selected online US survey that skews older and female with an average retirement age of 58 (below the US median), over-representing early retirees; that 20% likely reflects financial unpreparedness more than a genuine preference for continued employment — 86% of the same respondents wished they had saved more, and involuntary early retirees (health problems, layoffs) are conflated with voluntary ones. No cited US survey directly measures "regret working too long," so the inaction side uses a UK proxy: Which? (May 2025, n=1,188) found "half as many" as the ~10% who felt they retired too early said they retired too late — roughly 5%. That number is a fraction ("half as many"), not a precise percentage, and a UK sample; it should be read as "regret about working too long is uncommon," bounded around 5%, not a US-calibrated point estimate. The low working-too-long rate may also be suppressed by survivorship bias: people who worked until they were physically unable may not be well enough to participate in surveys. Regret rates in countries with different retirement systems — 401(k) structures, Social Security rules, pension norms, or healthcare entitlements — may differ substantially.
