Topical issues

Around 35,000 persons residing abroad receive an earnings-related pension from Finland. The number of earnings-related pension recipients residing abroad has remained constant for a long period, but there have been changes for some countries. The number of recipients residing in Sweden falls steadily while the number of recipients in Estonia grows rapidly.

There is substantial variation accross Europe regarding pensioners’ subjective economic hardship. A recent research article shows that Finland is among the countries where subjective economic hardship is relatively rare and less frequent among the over-64-year-olds than among other age groups.

The time of exceptional indexes is over. The Finnish Centre for Pensions estimates that the 2025 earnings-related pension index will grow less than the wage coefficient. As a result, a person who retires on an earnings-related pension in 2025 may receive a slightly higher index increment to their pension than a person who retires in 2024.

Retirement on a disability pension has decreased clearly among people aged between 50 and 60 years. This is evident when examining the development by successive age cohorts. A study by the Finnish Centre for Pensions shows that full disability retirement has decreased over a longer period of time. At the same time, retirement on a partial disability pension has also decreased as of the cohorts born in the early 1960s.

The group of new disability pensioners includes an increasingly higher share of younger people whose income depends on the national pension or other social security benefits. At the same time, the partial disability pension has gained in popularity. For partial disability pensioners, income from work alongside the earnings-related pension is important. A total of 180,000 persons received a disability pension in Finland in 2023.

More than 60 per cent of Finns find employment-based immigration to be a good means to strengthen pension financing if so required. According to the fresh Pension Barometer, the second most popular alternative is to raise pension contributions. Most respondents object to cutting current or future pensions.

According to statistics of the Finnish Centre for Pensions, nearly 21,000 new partial old-age pensions were paid out in Finland in 2023. The amount was one and a half times higher than the previously established amount, but 14,000 less than in 2022. The exceptional index development in 2022 encouraged people to retire early towards the end of the year.

Educational expansion has improved labour force participation of over-55-year-olds in the last decades. Particularly women’s education level has increased rapidly. Labour force participation of low-educated people has increased at a lower pace in several Member States of the European Union. This is evident from a fresh research article by the Finnish Centre for Pensions.

The accrued pension increases if a person continues to work beyond their retirement age, thanks to both the increment for late retirement and the additional pension accrued for continued working.

The Pro Gradu Award of the Finnish Centre for Pensions has been granted this year to Pellervo Ruponen (MSE). In his master’s thesis Predicting diagnosis classes from medical texts using deep transformer-based models, Ruponen examines the classification of texts in the assessment of disability pension applications.