Anyone born after 5 April 1950 may well find themselves confused about their pension age. We have been told that men and women’s retirement ages are being equalised by 2020, that they are being increased to 66 between 2018 and 2020 and now that future increases will be linked with increases in average life expectancy. So given all these changes how do we know when we can retire?

The short answer is that we can only retire when we can afford to do so. The retirement age referred to is just the date on which you start to receive your state pension. Now that employers are no longer able to impose a retirement date on their employees, the actual retirement date is likely to become much more variable depending on the circumstances of the individual.

To help you with your retirement planning, you can use the following link to the Direct Gov website to calculate the retirement age for any individual.