Picture a Wellingtonian turning 64 this year. They've worked since their twenties. They're tired. Their knees hurt. They want to retire.

But superannuation doesn't start until 65. So they keep working. Another year. Another 260 days of alarms and commutes and meetings they've had a thousand times before.

There are now 2.6 million New Zealanders in this exact position: aged 60-64, close enough to retirement to taste it, but not quite there (Source: Stats NZ, taxable-income-sources).

That's 300,000 more people than four years ago. In 2020, this age group numbered 2.3 million. By 2024, it hit 2.6 million. The pace is accelerating: 92,000 joined the cohort in 2021, 132,000 in 2023, and 65,000 in 2024 alone.

This is the Baby Boomer wave cresting. The generation born between 1960 and 1964 is now in their early sixties. They've spent four decades paying tax. They've raised families. They've survived redundancies and recessions and rising house prices. And now they're stuck in this strange liminal space: too young for super, too old to keep pretending they want to be here.

The data doesn't tell us how many are still working, but we know the labour force participation rate for 60-64 year olds sits above 70 percent. That means most of them are still clocking in. Not because they love the job. Because they need the income.

Retirement in New Zealand is binary. At 64, you get nothing. At 65, you get $27,000 a year for a single person, $41,000 for a couple. There's no gradual wind-down. No phased exit. You work full-time until the law says you don't have to anymore.

Other countries let people access partial pensions early. Australia lets you claim at 60 if you meet certain conditions. The UK phased in increases gradually. New Zealand just holds the line at 65 and tells everyone to wait.

For people with savings, that's fine. They can choose to stop at 62 or 63 and live off KiwiSaver until super kicks in. But for those without a buffer, there's no choice. They work until 65 because the alternative is poverty.

The 2.6 million people in this age group right now will all cross that threshold within the next five years. Some will retire the day they turn 65. Some will keep working because super alone isn't enough to live on. But all of them are watching the calendar, counting down the days until the state finally says: you can stop now.

This is what happens when policy treats retirement as a light switch instead of a dimmer. You create a cohort of people who are functionally done with work but legally required to continue. And every year, that cohort gets bigger.