Age Discrimination Statistics (2026)

The EEOC received 16,353 age discrimination charges under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act in fiscal 2025.

That is 18.5% of the 88,201 charges the agency received across all statutes that year.

It recovered $106.9 million for age charging parties, the highest annual figure in the series that runs back to fiscal 1997, when it was $44.3 million.

Age charges peaked at 24,582 in fiscal 2008, as the financial crisis produced the layoffs that generate this kind of claim.

They fell to 11,500 in fiscal 2022, the lowest in the series, at the tightest point of the post-pandemic labour market when older workers had options.

They have risen every year since: 14,144 in 2023, 16,233 in 2024 and 16,353 in 2025. This series is one of the more sensitive labour-market indicators available, because it responds to how easily a displaced older worker can find another job.

Of the 16,937 age charges resolved in fiscal 2025, 11,395, or 67.3%, ended in a finding of no reasonable cause.

Another 3,091, or 18.2%, were administrative closures, which covers withdrawals without benefits, failures to locate the charging party and similar.

Merit resolutions, meaning settlements, withdrawals with benefits, reasonable cause findings and successful conciliations combined, were 2,451, or 14.5%.

The two headline numbers point in opposite directions. Recovery is at a record high and two-thirds of charges end in no reasonable cause.

Both are true because outcomes are concentrated. A small number of merit resolutions carry most of the money: 2,451 merit resolutions produced $106.9 million.

The reasonable cause rate has also fallen a long way. It was 8.3% of resolutions in fiscal 1999 and 1.5% in fiscal 2025.

In fiscal 2025 the most common basis was retaliation at 54,350 charges, followed by disability at 36,256, race at 29,338, sex at 26,941 and age at 16,353.

A single charge can allege several bases at once, so those figures sum to far more than the 88,201 total charges. The EEOC states this directly.

Retaliation now appears in more than 60% of all charges, which reflects that a retaliation claim can attach to any underlying complaint.

The EEOC's monetary benefits figures explicitly exclude anything obtained through litigation, so $106.9 million is a floor on what age claims recovered.

They also exclude charges filed with state or local Fair Employment Practices Agencies, which handle a large volume of employment claims separately.

And they capture only claims that were filed at all. The share of people who experience age discrimination and never file is not measurable from this dataset and is certainly large.

The financial damage from displacement in the 50s and 60s is rarely the gap in pay while unemployed.

It is the re-entry salary, which is frequently below the previous one, and it becomes the base for every subsequent raise.

It is also the years of employer retirement contributions that stop. Employer retirement contributions in private industry average $4.20 an hour at the 90th wage percentile, so a two-year gap at that level is roughly $17,000 of foregone contributions before any growth on them.

Social Security benefits are calculated on the highest 35 years of indexed earnings, so late-career years usually replace much lower early-career ones.

A displaced worker at 58 who does not return to a comparable salary loses those replacement years, and the effect on the benefit is permanent rather than temporary.

The same event can also push someone into claiming earlier than planned, which reduces the monthly benefit for life. Those two effects compound in the same direction.

The practical reading is that the last decade of work is less certain than most retirement plans assume it to be.

A plan that requires full earnings until 65 has no margin for the event this dataset counts 16,353 times a year, and that count is only the people who filed a federal charge.

Building the plan to survive a two or three year earnings gap in the late 50s is the version of this that is actionable, and it usually means a higher contribution rate earlier rather than a longer working life later.

Severance is normally calculated on tenure and current salary, so it is sized to the job that ended rather than to the time it takes to find the next one.

For an older worker, the search is typically longer, which is precisely the mismatch that makes the package feel adequate at the point of signing and inadequate a year later.

There is no national statistic on severance size, and the absence is worth stating: it is not published by any federal agency, so any figure quoted for it comes from a private survey.

A charge is an allegation, not a finding. A charge count measures what people alleged, not what happened.

Resolutions in a given year include charges carried over from previous years, which is why resolutions can exceed receipts, as they did in fiscal 2025 at 16,937 against 16,353.

The data covers charges filed with the EEOC and not those filed with state or local Fair Employment Practices Agencies, so it is a subset of all employment discrimination claims in the US.

Age charge receipts, resolutions and monetary benefits are from EEOC table E5a, ADEA charge receipts and resolutions by type of resolution, fiscal 1997 to fiscal 2025.

Charges by basis are from table E1a and the all-statute totals from table E1c, both covering the same period.

The employer retirement contribution figure used in the planning section is from the BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation for March 2026. This page is informational and is not legal advice.