Why business owners over 55 will never stop working

Our recent study has found that those over 55 are more likely to say they would never stop working than any other age-group, as well as being more likely to say this was out of choice.

Key findings include:

63% of business owners over 55 say they will never stop working, at least in some capacity (part-time or otherwise), compared with 53% of younger business owners.

67% of those planning to work past the legal age of retirement said this was because they loved their jobs, rather than out of necessity.

Of those that did know what age they would be retiring, 82% of business owners over 55 said they would work past the legal retirement age, while 37% said they would want to work into their 70s. By contrast, across all age-groups, only 39% say they plan to work past 65 and just 16% plan to work into their 70's.

For many people who have set up a business - spending an entire career developing and nurturing it into the enterprise that it is today - the idea of doing anything else may seem quite alien!

(The research was conducted by YouGov among a representative sample of 1,266 small business decision makes in April 2020 spanning industry sectors).