Belgians’ Pension Departure Dates Quietly Pushed Back
Thousands of Belgians over 60 who logged back into the federal pension portal this summer were met with an unwelcome discovery: their first possible retirement date had moved back by several months, sometimes close to a year. The cause is a little-publicised technical change buried inside the pension reform of the government led by Bart De Wever, which raised the number of working days required for a year to count toward a career.
According to RTBF, the threshold per career year rose from 104 to 156 days, and the change applies retroactively across an entire working life, meaning years that once counted may no longer qualify.
Why the Dates Are Moving
The reform, driven by the “Arizona” coalition, raises the legal pension age to 67 and introduces a bonus for working past that age and a malus for leaving before it. But the change catching many people off guard is narrower: how many days of work (or equivalent) are needed for each year to be recognised as a full career year.
“For a complete year, we count 312 days of work, 52 weeks of six days,” explained Alice Weymeers, general adviser at the Service Pensions. “104 days is ultimately a third of 312. So working four months full-time or eight months part-time used to be enough.” Under the new rule, she added, “156 days means a full year of part-time work, or six months full-time.”
Because the change is retroactive, it can ripple backwards through decades of a career, pulling the earliest possible departure date into the future.
Who Is Most Affected
Two smoothing mechanisms were created to soften the blow: a reserve pot of five days available to everyone, and “equilibrium days” for people with long stretches of variable part-time work. Those tools can move days between adjacent years to plug small gaps.
For some, they are not enough. Elisabeth, a 60-year-old psychologist at a child-protection non-profit, saw her date shift from May 2032 to January 2033, eight months later. “I’ve worked for 36 years,” she told RTBF. “Part of it was part-time, then three-quarters time, and then I worked full-time for a very long time. Yet I was never unemployed, never took parental leave, never took a career break. Nothing at all.”
The reform falls hardest on people with fragmented or part-time careers, disproportionately women. As RTBF’s analysis of the reform’s gender impact notes, 40.2% of salaried women worked part-time in 2024, against 12.1% of men. One in four women cites caring for children or dependent relatives as the reason.
Benedicte Canivez, a legal expert at the CNE union, put the arithmetic bluntly: “Because sick days are not counted, it only takes being ill for one day in the year to fall below the 156-day threshold. That year simply will not count anymore.”
Government Defends the Reform
The office of Pensions Minister Jan Jambon (N-VA) argues the 156-day criterion was chosen deliberately to protect part-time workers. “The 156-day criterion was deliberately chosen to protect the many women working part-time, who often take on caregiving tasks within the family,” the cabinet told RTBF, calling the reform “an emancipatory project par excellence.”
The Service Pensions stresses that not all careers are affected equally. Civil servants and teachers are also hit by changes to career-revaluation coefficients, which previously allowed certain years to count for more than twelve months.
Marie-Noelle, a 60-year-old teacher, saw her date move from 1 May 2031 to 1 April 2032, eleven months, after her coefficient dropped from 1.05 to 1.025. But because she had signed an agreement with the French Community, that contract prevails, and she can still leave in May 2031, Weymeers confirmed.
A Slowly Unfolding Transition
The reform was adopted by the Chamber overnight on 28-29 May 2026 and published in the Moniteur belge on 1 June. The Service federal des Pensions confirms that for a first possible pension date after 1 January 2027, only career years of at least 156 days will count, with transitional protection limiting postponement to one year for those born before 1966 and two years for those born in 1966.
The mypension.be portal was paused in March 2026 to rebuild its calculation engines. Access reopened to the over-60s in July, as RTBF reported. Full estimates for the whole population will only return around the end of 2027, and the site is still refining individual dates month by month.
What to Watch For
The Service Pensions remains the authoritative reference for individual cases, and it advises anyone with questions to check mypension.be directly rather than rely on estimates. With the malus for early retirement coming into force from 2027 and gender-gap concerns already raised by the Comite d’etude sur le vieillissement, the coming months of data corrections will be closely watched, both for the dates they change and the fairness questions they reopen. For now, the message to Belgians nearing retirement is simple: check your file, because the date you were given may no longer be the date you get.