Pat Archer knows the routines of residents at the assisted living facility outside Boston where she works, keeping detailed notes to remind them of hairdresser appointments, bridge games and family visits.
Having a part-time job isn’t how she envisioned her life at 73. But she enjoys the residents — some of whom are several years her junior.
For two decades, Ms. Archer worked as an accountant for Sylvania, the lighting manufacturing company. It was a fulfilling career with travel that took her across the country and overseas.
She retired in 2020, confident she and her husband could get by on around $2,200 in Social Security benefits and a small monthly pension payment from her job.
“I had worked hard for many years and thought I would be fine financially,” she said.
Instead, paying bills every month became stressful. Medicare covers only a portion of her diabetes medications. Simple necessities, like groceries, gas and internet, kept getting more expensive. Her husband has physical constraints that limit his job options. So four years ago, Ms. Archer decided she had to return to work.
“There has been no travel and no vacations,” she said of her new life. “What there has been is a whole lot of keeping a close watch on what I am spending.”
In recent months, stories of older Americans working past the typical retirement age have captivated social media. After a doorbell camera captured a 78-year-old Tennessee man delivering for DoorDash because of financial troubles, the homeowner started an online fund-raiser. And in a staged event to promote what President Trump has called his “no-tax-on-tips” policy, he received a fast-food delivery from Sharon Simmons, an Arkansas woman known as “DoorDash Grandma,” who has worked the gig job since 2022 to help support her 10 grandchildren.
Roughly 37 percent of Americans over 55 are in the work force; some of them, like Ms. Archer, are “unretired” — they tried and failed to leave the daily grind. People return to work because they are bored or want to help others, but the largest single reason is financial, according to an AARP survey conducted this winter. That survey of around 2,000 Americans over 50 found that 48 percent returned to work because they needed the money.
“There is a great deal of financial insecurity,” said Teresa Ghilarducci, a professor of economics and policy at the New School. “People are fired from retirement and return to work.”
Geoffrey Sanzenbacher tracks the return of retirees to the workplace as an economics professor at Boston College and a fellow at the Center for Retirement Research. He determines “unretirement” by tracking people interviewed in the Current Population Survey, a monthly poll of U.S. households, who are working one year after they previously said they were retired.
He said that since the pandemic, the peak of unretirement came in 2022, when more than 7 percent of previously retired people ages 55 to 64 returned to work. This, he said, was at least in part because of a strong labor market. That was around the time Ms. Archer returned to work. Finding her job as a concierge at the assisted living facility was not difficult, she said.
“They needed the help, and I needed a job,” she said.
A high unretirement rate, Mr. Sanzenbacher noted, can suggest both broad labor market strength and economic need among certain groups of people. According to his recent data, 6.1 percent of people ages 55 to 64 who said they were retired in January 2025, were working a year later. With gasoline prices ticking up as a result of the war with Iran, Mr. Sanzenbacher said he expected more retirees would want to return to the work force.
The Consumer Price Index report showed inflation in March increased to 3.3 percent compared with the same time period last year — a reflection, in part, of the system shock from the ongoing war. While Social Security benefits are adjusted annually for inflation based on the previous year’s data, those updates can lag behind actual increases in the cost of living.
“People often return to work when costs go up,” Mr. Sanzenbacher said, noting that the current percentage of unretirees has remained relatively high even though the labor market has cooled.
Mr. Sanzenbacher noted that the people in the “unretired” group tended to be nonwhite, live in multigenerational households and have more education. Twenty-three percent of those in the most recent survey lived in households with several generations, compared with 17 percent for those who remained retired, according to Mr. Sanzenbacher.
“This could reflect the need to work to support family members,” he said.
Among the people returning to work, 44 percent had a bachelor’s degree, compared with 37 percent who remained retired. Mr. Sanzenbacher said people with college degrees tended to find jobs more easily. Even if they want to start earning money again, less educated retirees find that getting a job is tougher.
After 26 years working for the police department in Hampton, Va., Brandt Hess retired in 2024. Before he quit, Mr. Hess, now 57, was earning $90,000 a year as a detective investigating fraud and money laundering. But he was burned out, and as the stresses of the job became overwhelming, the idea of living on his $4,000-a-month pension felt more plausible. That feeling did not last long.
“Then it’s like everything — electricity, beef, you name it — started going higher and higher, and the prices have just remained there,” he said.
Mr. Hess, whose main expense was the mortgage payment on the home he and his wife bought in 2006, began searching for jobs. He landed one last year at a local credit union, where he works full time as a fraud investigator. It is more of a traditional office job than his previous work, and he earns around $60,000 a year. Combining that with his pension, he has more to live on than if he had remained on the police force.
Mr. Hess and his wife, who is employed, have three adult children who still live at home. For now, he remains a primary financial supporter of his children as they attend college and begin careers of their own, he said.
“I did a lot of hard and labor-intensive work for 20-plus years,” he said. “I wish, if only, that I could just stop and not need to work.”
For James Jones, leaving the work force initially didn’t feel like a choice.
He retired from his job as a cook at a hospital in 2021, when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and, later, lung cancer. Now 72, Mr. Jones, who lives in the college town of Norman, Okla., said returning to work didn’t feel like a choice, either. His cancer in remission, he found a job in the kitchen of a local program that delivers meals to people his age.
Most mornings he rises before the sun to get to work, where he starts preparing specialties like Salisbury steak or goulash at 6 a.m. He earns $10.06 an hour, a few dollars above the state’s minimum wage of $7.25. His Social Security comes to $1,200 a month. When he’s not at work, Mr. Jones likes to rest on his couch and watch reruns of shows like “Dateline” and “48 Hours.” Cable television, he said, is one of the small joys of his life.
“Even that is becoming almost too expensive,” he said of the cost of cable, especially with elevated gas prices that in recent weeks have taken a larger chunk of his income.
“I do like my job, because I get my steps in,” Mr. Jones said on a recent afternoon. “There’s some health benefits to working at this age.”
Back in New England, Ms. Archer is grateful that the assisted living facility where she works is only five miles from her home. If it were a longer commute, Ms. Archer said, she would need to reconsider because of gas prices.
She knows her Social Security payments are adjusted for inflation, but it doesn’t feel that way.
“It’s like there is no going back to prices we saw five years ago or even two years ago,” she said.
Ben Casselman contributed reporting.
