Most workers dream of retirement, it is, after all, the age at which you can finally relax and let go of the daily grind, and with a bit of luck, you will be healthy enough to enjoy the experience. But although everyone gets older and of course at some point stops working due to necessity or just will, not everyone meets the two conditions needed to call it retirement. These conditions are a minimum age and a minimum number of work credits.
Although nowadays there is a trend to claim “early retirement” in administrative terms that just means you stop working, but it does not guarantee that you will be able to claim any type of benefits from the Social Security Administration (SSA), which is usually what defines retirement for most of us. Having said that, most of these “retire early” individuals keep sources of passive income or side gigs to help pass the time, they just escape the 9 to 5 grind, so when we are talking about the official requirements, these people often fall into the same bucket as regular workers as they still pay income tax and into Social Security.
The two minimum requirements to be able to claim retirement benefits
The first one is age. In the United States there is an age at which the government declares you to be able to claim your full pension, which is set after working for a number of years which we will discuss below. This age is called “Full Retirement Age” and it currently sits at 67 years old. Now, most people believe that it is 65, as that was the original age and continues to be the age at which a person can claim Medicare, but over the past few years it has been increased slowly to account for the fact that we now live longer.
If you do not want to (or cannot) wait until 67 years old to claim your full pension, the earliest one can choose to retire and still access benefits is 62 years old. That might sound good, especially to the “retire early” crowd (although they tend to aim for their 40s or 50s to still enjoy their youth without the grind), if you choose this option you will be permanently forfeiting a percentage of your benefits.
If you work until you are 67, you will get 100% of your benefits, but if you retire at 62, you will only get 70% of your benefits. There is a third option, which is to retire late and wait until you turn 70 years old. Whilst this is the least attractive option, your pension will increase to 124% of your benefits, so if you are in good health and you like your job (or have a ton of passive income) you might want to consider the option.
The second requirement to claim retirement is to have enough credits to do so. You get credits for every year that you have worked earning and paying taxes on a minimum amount of money, as each credit has a monetary value. You can earn up to 4 credits per year (in 2025 you will need to earn $1810 per credit, which means that a person must have an annual income of $7240 to reach the maximum number of credits) and will need a minimum of 40 credits to claim any kind of retirement.
While your pension will not be anywhere near enough to sustain you during your golden years with just 10 years of working (four credits per year times ten years of work gives you the minimum forty credits you need) it is a good start and at least you will get to claim some benefits.