The government announced on 7 December that the retirement age will rise from the current 66 years and four months to 66 years and seven months in 2025, confirming the calculations that the ECO had made based on recent data from the National Statistics Institute (INE).


In the bill published in Diário da República, the Ministry of Labour also makes it official that the cut applied to the pensions of those who retire early will increase from the current 13.8 percent to 15.8 percent in 2024.


"Taking into account the effects of the evolution of average life expectancy at the age of 65 in the application of the formula provided for in paragraph 3 of article 20 of Decree-Law no. 187/2007, of 10 May, the normal age of access to the pension in 2025 is 66 years and seven months," reads the decree known this morning.


By law, the retirement age is determined on the basis of average life expectancy at 65. At the end of November, INE released the provisional value of this indicator for the three-year period between 2021 and 2023: average life expectancy at 65 rose to 19.75 years, which allowed ECO to calculate that the retirement age will rise to 66 years and seven months in 2025, three months more than it was in 2023 and will be applied in 2024.


In practice, the retirement age will return in 2025 to where it was in 2022, thus cancelling out the effect that the pandemic had had. The mortality caused by Covid-19 had led to an unprecedented drop in the normal pension age, but now this age limit will go back up.


It should be noted that until 2013 the normal retirement age was 65. In 2014, it rose to 66 and from then on it was updated in line with the gains in average life expectancy at 65.