How Long Should a Retirement Plan Last? Life Expectancy for Couples

Life Expectancy Is an Average, Not a Plan Age

Life expectancy sounds like a forecast of when someone will die. It is something narrower: the average number of years remaining for a group of people the same age, if each year of their lives carried the death rates of a given table. The Social Security Administration’s 2023 period life table, the one published with the 2026 Trustees Report, gives a 65-year-old man about 18.1 more years and a 65-year-old woman about 20.7, which puts the averages at about 83 and 86.

An average says little about any one life. The ages at death are spread widely around it, and the spread is what a plan has to survive. Using the same table, here is what a 65-year-old faces:

A 65-year-old man. Half of men reach about 84. One in four reaches about 90, and one in ten reaches about 94. His chance of reaching 90 is about 24%, and of reaching 95, about 8%.

A 65-year-old woman. Half of women reach about 87. One in four reaches about 92, and one in ten reaches about 96. Her chance of reaching 90 is about 35%, and of reaching 95, about 14%.

The midpoint, the age half of people reach, runs a little later than the average because a minority of early deaths pull the average down: slightly more than half of men outlive the average of about 83, and slightly more than half of women outlive the average of about 86. A plan built to end at life expectancy is a plan that runs out for more than half the people who use it. For a plan that spends the same amount every year no matter what happens, that is worse than a coin flip on whether the money lasts. That is why planners rarely use life expectancy itself as a plan age, and why the real question is how far past it to plan, for whom, and what happens if the household lives longer still.

Couples Plan for the Last Survivor

For a married couple, the question changes shape. The money has to last as long as either spouse is alive, so what matters is the second death, and two lifespans give two chances at a long one. For a man and a woman who are both 65 today, treating their lifespans as independent, the same table gives these odds that at least one of them is alive:

At 85, about 76%. Three couples in four still have a spouse living.

At 90, about 51%. Even odds.

At 95, about 21%. About one couple in five.

At 100, about 4%. Rare, but not negligible across a lifetime of planning.

The second death comes at about 90 at the median, and there is one chance in four that a spouse is still living at about 94 and one in ten at about 98. The first death, by contrast, comes at about 79 at the median. Both spouses are alive at 85 in only about 25% of couples, and at 90 in about 8%. These figures treat the two lifespans as independent. Spouses’ lifespans tend to move together somewhat, which trims the odds that one of them lives very long, so the figures for the couple run slightly high on that count, even as the reasons in the next section push the other way.

The shaded band in the chart is the part of retirement that plans most often skip: the years when one spouse is alive and the other has died. At 85, the chance that at least one spouse is living, about 76%, is three times the chance that both are, about 25%. A plan that models a couple as a single unit, living and spending together until one date, misses that band entirely, along with the change in income, taxes, and spending that comes with it. We come back to the survivor below.

Why the Tables Probably Understate Your Odds

The life table is a reasonable starting point and a weak finishing point. For many households who are working with a planner, several things push the real odds of a long life above what the table shows, and the conversation about them is where most of the useful information comes from.

The table holds today’s death rates still. A period life table applies one year’s death rates to every future year of a person’s life. A 65-year-old today will be 85 in 2046, and the period table assumes an 85-year-old in 2046 dies at the rate an 85-year-old did in 2023. The Trustees expect death rates to keep falling, and their cohort tables, which build that improvement in, give people turning 65 in 2026 about 19.2 more years for men and 21.8 for women. The Trustees’ projected period figures for the same year are 18.4 and 20.9 (the 2023 table used in this article gives 18.1 and 20.7). The cohort basis adds roughly a year, on average.

Income and wealth predict longevity. Research by Raj Chetty and colleagues, published in JAMA in 2016 and based on federal tax and death records, found that among 40-year-olds, the richest 1% of men could expect to live 14.6 years longer than the poorest 1%, and the richest 1% of women 10.1 years longer. The gradient runs through the whole income range, not just the extremes. A table built for the entire population includes everyone, so it understates the odds for a household with the health care, education, and resources that tend to come with saving enough to need a retirement plan.

Health matters a great deal. Smoking history, chronic conditions, and how well someone can walk, sleep, and recover from illness at 65 say a lot about the next 25 years, often more than any table can. A healthy nonsmoker in a wealthier household can reasonably plan beyond the table. Someone with a serious diagnosis can reasonably plan short of it.

Family history is a useful signal, not a forecast. Parents who lived to 95 feel like a strong signal, and many people anchor on them. How strong a signal it is remains an open research question. Research by J. Graham Ruby and colleagues, published in Genetics in 2018 and drawn from public family trees covering more than 400 million people, put the heritability of lifespan at likely no more than 7%, in part because people tend to marry partners who resemble them in traits tied to lifespan, what researchers call assortative mating, which had inflated earlier estimates. Research by Ben Shenhar, Uri Alon, and colleagues at the Weizmann Institute, published in Science in 2026 and drawn from twin records, adjusted for deaths from outside causes such as accidents and infections and put the genetic share of the variation in lifespan at about half. Either way, long-lived parents say something about genes, habits, circumstances, and conditions that run in families, and they belong in the conversation alongside health and the statistics rather than in place of them.

None of these factors turns into a precise number on its own. Together they suggest that, for many households who plan carefully, the table is closer to a floor than a ceiling.

What People Expect, and What We Hear

People are not very good at guessing their own lifespans, and the errors are not random. Research by Cormac O’Dea and David Sturrock, using a long-running survey of older adults in England and matching their expectations to what actually happened, found that people in their early 60s underestimated their chance of reaching 75 by more than 25 percentage points, and people in their early 70s underestimated their chance of reaching 85 by more than 15 points. The pattern reversed at the oldest ages: people in their late 80s and beyond tended to overestimate their chances. In other words, people tend to be pessimistic exactly when the planning decisions are made, in their 60s and 70s.

When we first ask, the men we work with typically say they expect to live into their mid to late 80s, and the women into their late 80s or early 90s. Several expect to live into their early to mid 90s, and a few have said they could live far longer. Those first answers sit at or a little above the table’s midpoints. For healthier, wealthier households, the evidence above suggests the real odds run later still, which is why a first answer is where the conversation starts, not where it ends.

The gap between the two spouses’ expectations matters as much as either one. If they are the same age, a husband who expects to live to 85 and a wife who expects to live to 92 are describing a plan that runs to 92, with about seven years in which she is on her own. That is a different plan from the one either of them pictures alone.

Each Year Lived Moves the Finish Line

Life expectancy is not a fixed date. Every year a person survives removes one of the ways the future could have ended early, so the expected age at death rises with age.

At 65, the expected age at death in the 2023 table is about 83 for a man and 86 for a woman. At 75 it is about 86 and 88. At 85 it is about 91 for a man and 92 for a woman, and at 95 it is about 98 for both. A plan set at 65 to end at life expectancy reaches its end in the early to mid 80s, yet at 85 the table still gives a man about 6 more years and a woman about 7.

That is the practical case for revisiting the plan’s age rather than setting it once. A plan reviewed regularly can move the age later as the household approaches it, and revisit it whenever health changes, so the change arrives a little at a time, years before it would matter, instead of all at once at the end. It is also why the age chosen at 65 is less permanent than it feels. The decision is not “we will live to 92.” It is “we will plan to 92 for now, and revisit it as the years and our health tell us more.”

What a Longer Plan Costs, and What a Shorter One Risks

Choosing the age is a trade between two risks, longevity risk on one side and underspending on the other, and each has a price.

A longer plan costs spending and giving now. Every year added to the plan is another year the same savings must cover, and in a plan that holds spending steady, the effect shows up in the starting amount. In our own calculation on Robert Shiller’s public market data for a portfolio of 60% stocks and 40% bonds, the worst historical start year supported a starting withdrawal of about 4.0% for 30 years, 3.7% for 40, and 3.5% for 50, while the median start year supported about 6.5%, 5.3%, and 4.9%. In our Monte Carlo example of a couple drawing $80,000 a year from savings, ending the plan at 90 instead of 95 lifted the simulated probability of success from about 83% to about 93%, and extending it to 100 lowered it to about 73%.

A plan set too long has a cost too. Planning every household to 100 sounds prudent, but for most of them it means spending and giving less than they could for decades, for the sake of an outcome that, for a couple both 65, the table puts at about 4%. We see underspending far more often than overspending, as our article on why retirees underspend explains, and the years it costs are the ones in which money does the most for a household: the travel while travel is still easy, the help to children while it still makes a difference, the giving while the giver can see it land.

A shorter plan risks the late years. If the plan ends at 88 and a spouse lives to 96, something has to give. In a plan that never adjusts, that something is the portfolio. In a plan with guardrails set in advance and regular reviews, it is spending, adjusted gradually as the plan’s age is moved later and the guardrails respond, rather than as a cliff at the end.

Two features of most retirements soften the trade. Spending tends to drift down in real terms as people age, as the research on the retirement spending smile shows, so the later years usually cost less than the early ones. And Social Security, which lasts for life and rises with inflation, covers a larger share of spending in a household’s 80s and 90s than in its 60s, at least while both spouses are living. Neither makes the late years free, and long-term care is the main exception, but both make a plan with a sensible age and the ability to adjust more forgiving than a plan that is set once and has no way to change course.

The Survivor Years: Income, Taxes, and Spending

For couples, the plan’s age is really two questions: how long the household lasts, and how long one spouse lives alone. The second gets far less attention than it deserves.

For a man and a woman who are both 65, the survivor lives alone for about nine years at the median. The chance that the survivor outlives the other spouse by more than 5 years is about 70%, by more than 10 years about 44%, by more than 15 years about 25%, and by more than 20 years about 12%. When the spouses are the same age, the wife is the survivor about 58% of the time, and a husband who is older than his wife makes her widowhood longer still. Real couples’ lifespans are not fully independent, since spouses share homes, habits, and sometimes the stress of one another’s illness, which tends to narrow the gap somewhat. Even so, a decade alone is a common outcome, not an edge case.

Those years change the household’s finances in three ways at once.

Income falls, but not by half. When one spouse dies, the survivor generally keeps the larger of the two Social Security benefits and the smaller one stops (a survivor benefit claimed before full retirement age for survivor benefits is reduced). A pension with a survivor election keeps paying, often at a reduced amount. Portfolio income continues, and required distributions from the survivor’s accounts generally do not fall the way the lost Social Security check does.

Taxes rise on the same income. Usually from the year after the death, the survivor files as a single person, with brackets roughly half as wide as a married couple’s, a smaller standard deduction, and, through 2028, one $6,000 senior deduction instead of the two a couple both 65 or older could claim, with its phaseout beginning at $75,000 of modified adjusted gross income instead of $150,000. Medicare premium surcharge thresholds for a single filer are about half as high as a couple’s, and because Medicare looks back two years, that change arrives two to three years after the death. The same income can produce a noticeably larger tax bill, a shift we cover in our article on the widow’s tax penalty.

Spending falls, but not by half either. Some costs do not depend on how many people live in the house. The mortgage or rent, the property tax, the homeowner’s insurance, and much of the upkeep stay about where they were. Others scale with the number of people: groceries, a second car and its insurance, a second set of Medicare premiums and out-of-pocket health costs.

That last point is why we lean toward rebuilding the survivor’s budget line by line rather than applying a rule of thumb. Two widely used scales for comparing households of different sizes, the OECD-modified scale and the square root scale that recent OECD publications use, put a single person’s needs at about two thirds to seven tenths of a couple’s. A real household can land well above or below that range depending on how much of its budget is fixed.

Consider a hypothetical couple whose essential spending is $96,000 a year. Of that, $24,000 is a mortgage, $12,000 is property tax and homeowner’s insurance, $9,000 is utilities and upkeep, $14,000 is groceries and household costs, $10,000 is two cars, $15,000 is Medicare premiums and other health costs for two people, and $12,000 is everything else. For the survivor, the mortgage, the property tax, and the homeowner’s insurance stay at $36,000, utilities and upkeep ease to $8,000, groceries fall to $8,000, one car costs $5,500, health costs fall to $7,500 for one person, and everything else comes to $8,000. The survivor’s essential budget is $73,000, about 76% of the couple’s, well above the two-thirds a simple rule would suggest, because so much of this household’s budget is housing that does not shrink. A household with its home paid off would land lower.

Put the three changes together and the survivor often faces a squeeze: income down by one Social Security check, taxes up on what remains, and spending down by much less than half. That squeeze is a large part of why the first death matters so much to a couple’s plan, and why it shapes decisions made decades earlier, such as which spouse delays Social Security and how much to convert to Roth while both spouses are filing jointly.

What the Plan’s Age Touches

The plan’s age is an input to nearly every other retirement decision, which is one reason to set it deliberately rather than accept a default.

Social Security claiming. Delaying benefits is, in effect, buying more lifetime income, and the purchase pays off only if someone lives long enough to collect it. Longevity is one of the questions we weigh in the claiming decision, alongside the cost of funding the delay, how readily the household spends guaranteed income compared with savings, the taxes in the gap years, and its values. For couples with very different benefits, the survivor benefit usually dominates: the higher earner’s claiming age sets the check the survivor will live on, possibly for a decade or more, which generally argues for the higher earner delaying if the portfolio can carry the wait.

Roth conversions. A longer plan means more years of tax-free growth for converted dollars, and the years a survivor files as a single person make the married years, with their wider brackets, more valuable for converting, as our article on Roth conversions in the gap years explains. The longer the expected survivor years, the stronger that case tends to be, weighed against Medicare surcharges, the heirs’ tax rates, and what the household plans to leave to charity.

Long-term care. The longest lives carry the largest chance of an extended need for care, and that tail sits at the far end of the plan. A plan with a sensible age still needs a separate answer for care, decided case by case, whether that is a named and modeled reserve, insurance on one spouse or a base layer, or a combination.

Annuities and other longevity insurance. An income annuity converts savings into income that lasts for life, which is exactly the risk a long plan worries about. We generally do not lean toward annuities, though we are always willing to look at one: we settle the Social Security decision first, size the gap-year Roth conversions second, and consider insurance only for the longevity worry that remains. For many households, that sequence leaves little for an annuity to do. For some, it leaves exactly the risk an annuity is built to cover.

Home equity as a backstop. For many households, the home is the reserve of last resort for a very long life. A home equity line of credit opened while it is easy to qualify can serve as a backstop the household hopes never to use, though its draw period is limited, its rate usually floats, and a lender can freeze or reduce it. A reverse mortgage works differently and remains an option to know about, rarely the first one to reach for.

What is left, and when. A longer plan usually leaves more behind if the household lives a typical lifespan, and that money tends to reach children late, when they are around 60 for children born when their parents were about 30. A household that wants its money to do good for family and causes can decide how much of the margin to give during life rather than leave at the end.

How We Think About It

We lean toward choosing the plan’s age with the household rather than for it, in a deliberate order. We start by showing a default age. Then we ask each spouse what they expect, based on their own thoughts. Then we look at the statistics together. Then we come back to personal health and family history, now with the statistics in view, and once we have talked it over, we agree on an age to use. For a couple, the plan runs to the later of the two spouses’ ages, with the first death modeled along the way. The research earlier in this article is the reason the conversation does not stop at the first answer: people in their 60s and 70s tend to underestimate their odds, and the table itself understates them for many of the households we work with.

The age is not set once. We revisit it whenever health changes, and as a household gets close to the age it planned to, we move it later, which is the expected finish line moving out in practice: a man who reaches 85 can expect about 6 more years, and a woman about 7. Those changes arrive at the plan’s regular reviews, about twice a year for retired households, years before they would otherwise become a problem.

Once the age is set, we lean toward starting spending where the plan puts it and letting the guardrails do their work, rather than starting lower still for the chance of a longer life. The margin of safety already sits in several places: spending starts below the plan’s best guess of what the money can support, spending lines are set in advance for when the plan would raise or cut, and the plan is reviewed regularly. A later age, chosen honestly, is part of that margin rather than a reason to add another cushion on top. The guardrails are built on the probability-of-success research Derek Tharp and Justin Fitzpatrick published at Kitces.com, which our article on retirement spending guardrails explains in full.

For couples, we lean toward modeling the first death in every plan and building the survivor’s budget while both spouses are alive, line by line. Costs that do not change with one fewer person, such as a mortgage, stay as they are, and the rest are adjusted, such as groceries, car insurance, and Medicare premiums. In the example above, that turns a $96,000 essential budget into $73,000 for the survivor, not the $48,000 that halving it would suggest. The result feeds the decisions that protect the survivor years, such as which spouse delays Social Security and how much to convert to Roth while both are filing jointly.

We lean toward this over one age applied to everyone and never revisited, for reasons that run through the numbers above. Planning everyone to 100 guards against an outcome the table puts at about 4% for a couple both 65, and pays for it with years of spending and giving that never happen. Planning everyone to life expectancy leaves more than half of households exposed. Between those, the plan’s age moves the answer a great deal: in the Monte Carlo example, from about 93% at 90 to about 73% at 100. And for a couple, there is about a 44% chance that the survivor lives alone for more than 10 years, years a plan built for two would miss. An age chosen with the household, tied to the evidence, and revisited as life unfolds keeps the plan honest in both directions.

The honest trade-off is that any age short of the oldest possible leaves some chance of living past it. If that happens, the cost shows up as lower spending in the later years, softened by the plan’s regular reviews, by Social Security, and by the reserves set aside for care and for the unexpected. For a household whose budget is mostly essential spending, with little room to adjust, we lean toward starting spending more conservatively. And for a household that values certainty over flexibility, a later age, or more income that does not depend on markets, can be the better fit. That is a decision we make case by case.

Common Questions

What age should I plan to live to in retirement?

There is no single right age, and life expectancy alone is too short, since slightly more than half of people outlive it. For a 65-year-old, Social Security’s table puts the average at about 83 for a man and 86 for a woman, with one in four men reaching about 90 and one in four women reaching about 92, and those figures likely understate the odds for healthier, wealthier households. We lean toward choosing the age with the household, starting from a default, then each spouse’s own expectation, then the statistics, then personal health and family history, and then agreeing on an age, which we revisit when health changes or as the household nears it.

What is the life expectancy of a 65-year-old couple?

For a 65-year-old man, life expectancy is about 18 more years, to about 83; for a 65-year-old woman, about 21 more years, to about 86. For a couple, the second death, the figure most people mean by joint life expectancy, comes at about 90 at the median. The more useful numbers for planning are the chances that at least one spouse is still alive: for a man and a woman who are both 65, Social Security’s 2023 period life table gives about 76% at 85, about 51% at 90, about 21% at 95, and about 4% at 100. Because the table assumes today’s death rates for life, the odds for people who are 65 now are likely somewhat higher.

How much does a surviving spouse need to live on?

Less than the couple, but usually much more than half. Housing costs such as a mortgage, property tax, and homeowner’s insurance often stay about the same, while groceries, car costs, and health costs, including Medicare premiums, fall. Rules of thumb put a single person’s needs at about two thirds to seven tenths of a couple’s, but a household with a large fixed housing cost can land higher. We lean toward building the survivor’s budget line by line while both spouses are alive, so the plan reflects the household’s own costs rather than a percentage.

Should I plan to live to 100 just to be safe?

For most households, planning everyone to 100 trades years of spending and giving for an outcome the table puts at about 4% for a couple both 65, though the odds are higher for some households than others. A plan that never adjusts has a stronger case for a very long age, because it has no other way to handle a long life. A plan with guardrails and regular reviews can move its age later as the household nears it, so it can start from an age chosen with the evidence in view and adjust gradually if the household lives longer. For a household with a strong family history, excellent health, or little room to cut spending, a later age can still be the right choice.