Not working until you’re 67? It’s possible, but consider these financial consequences for MyGuide

The government is working to raise the retirement age to keep the costs of old age affordable. Today, the legal retirement age for private sector employees is 65. In February 2025 this will increase to 66 and from February 2030 you may not retire until you are 67. However, different age limits apply to certain categories of employees, such as seamen or miners.

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No one is obliged to work until the legal retirement age. If you’ve saved enough to make it through retirement and are happy with the benefits of a lower pension, you can also stop working when you’re 50, for example.

Three factors affect your employee pension: the number of years you worked (or received unemployment or sickness benefits), your salary and your family situation.

The annuity is the sum of the pension income that you have accumulated during your career. The Federal Pensions Service calculates your entitlement by adding up all your salary (or your fictitious wages in the case of a benefit) for that year for each year of work, up to a maximum wage of €71,519.91. The service then reassesses this amount. The revalued pay for the year of work is then divided by 45 if you have 45 career years.

The amount you get after that is multiplied by 60 percent for most people. It doubles by just 75 percent for married couples who have a partner who gets no or almost no wages. Total pension shares is your annuity.

advice: This is how you calculate the amount of pension you will receive.

certainly. And you are not alone in this situation. Figures from Statbel show that in 2021, 37.5 percent of Belgian employees will retire before the age of 65.

The minimum age for early retirement is 60 if you’ve already had 44 years of employment, 61 if there’s been 43, and 63 if you’ve worked or received benefits for 42 years. So if you stopped working five years ago, you may be entitled to an early retirement pension based on the years you worked and the wages you received, but the amount of your pension will be less because you worked fewer years.

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If you stop working before you are entitled to a pension, it will affect the pension you will receive. If you stop working completely, you will have a lower figure in the above calculation for the number of years worked, and that will result in a lower amount of your annuity.

You approach your pension amount by multiplying your average wage over your entire career by 60 percent. Let’s say you worked not 45, but 30, then multiply this amount by 30/45. With your average monthly net salary of, say, 3,000 euros, you will receive a full pension of 1,800 euros. If you work for 30 years, that’s €1,200 (3,000 x 60% x (30/45)). Please note: You will only receive this monthly benefit when you reach the legal retirement age.

Read also: How do you apply for your pension?

If you stop working, of course you should know that you saved enough to bridge the years until you retire and then get less interest. Your statutory pension is just one of the different pillars that make up your pension. There are other ways to ensure that your pension amount remains large enough.

The first method, the “second pillar”, is the supplementary pension through group insurance provided by the employer as a statutory additional benefit.

The “third pillar” is the supplemental pension you get through individual retirement savings. Although these additional pension amounts will be less if you stop working early, you can still pay to look into this.

Finally, you can also keep a little extra by investing or saving freely.

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If you would like to calculate or refer to your personal pension, go to the website of the Federal Pension Service, mypension.be.

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