20% of early retirees regret their decision to stop working, and 34% of all retirees wish they had worked longer, according to a MedicareFAQ survey of 569 retired Americans. On the other side, only 6% of retirees say they regret working too long. This reverses the typical Gilovich pattern: here, action (retiring early) generates more regret than inaction (continuing to work). The reason is almost entirely financial — 86% of the same respondents wished they had saved more, and 75% of early retirees in a separate Manulife study said they regretted not saving enough.
Hurwitz and Mitchell (NBER Working Paper 30696, 2022) corroborate these figures with a controlled experiment of 1,764 Americans aged 50 and older. In their sample, 37% regretted not working longer and 57% regretted not saving more. The close alignment between the MedicareFAQ 34% and the Hurwitz-Mitchell 37% — from independent samples with different recruitment methods — strengthens the signal. Börsch-Supan et al. (2023) further disentangle timing regret from saving regret, showing that the dominant wish is “I should have saved more,” not “I should have retired later.” Working longer is often a proxy for the saving people failed to do.
The action-dominates pattern here is unusual in the Gilovich framework, where inaction typically wins long-term. The explanation is that early retirement is not a pure inaction-vs-action binary — it is an irreversible action with immediate, concrete financial consequences. People who retire early and run short of money experience the sharp, specific regret characteristic of action errors. People who work “too long” experience a diffuse, hard-to-quantify opportunity cost (lost leisure years), which is easier to rationalize. The 6% floor for working-too-long regret may also reflect survivorship bias: those who worked until health failed may not be surveyed.