Retirement Confidence Drops as More Americans Say They’ll Never Stop Working
More than two in five Americans, 43%, now expect to work until they die, according to a WalletHub survey cited by Fortune and released in late August 2026.
Nearly two in five respondents, 39%, said thinking about retirement makes them anxious, and 29% said they are counting on relatives for financial support once they stop working, Fortune reported.
The findings echo a broader argument laid out separately by MarketWatch: that the decades-long American image of retirement as a stretch of golf and leisure is fading.
Lawrence Samuel, a cultural historian and author of the new book “The Rise and Fall of Retirement in the United States: A Social History,” told MarketWatch he believes that era is over.
Samuel predicts Social Security will eventually disappear, replaced by a model in which older Americans keep working well past traditional retirement age.
That shift is already visible in the data. About 19% of Americans age 65 and older were in the labor force in 2025, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics figures cited by MarketWatch.
Inflation Is Eating Into Retirement Plans
Fortune tied recent retirement anxiety to a rise in prices. The national average for a gallon of regular gasoline hit $4.27 this week, up 13 cents in seven days, according to AAA data cited by Fortune.
Ground beef averaged $6.89 a pound in July, up 9.4% from a year earlier, per Bureau of Labor Statistics figures Fortune reported.
Confidence Keeps Slipping
Worry about retirement savings is not new. Gallup has found a majority of Americans worried about having enough retirement money every year since 2001, ranking it the country's top financial concern, Fortune noted.
But the numbers are worsening. A National Institute on Retirement Security report released in August 2026 found 61% of Americans are concerned they won't reach financial security in retirement.
Of that group, 73% pointed to inflation and 62% cited market volatility, according to Fortune's reporting on the NIRS findings.
Separately, the Employee Benefit Research Institute's 2026 Retirement Confidence Survey found worker confidence in retiring comfortably fell six points to 61%, Fortune reported.
Debt Is Compounding the Problem
In the NIRS report, 74% of respondents called debt a problem, and 77% said it stops them from saving adequately for retirement, Fortune reported.
Together, the surveys point to a widening gap between what Americans expect from retirement and what they can currently afford to save toward it.