Colombia spent years fighting over whether to reform its pension system, and when Congress finally approved President Gustavo Petro’s reform in June 2024, with the new rules taking effect in July 2025, the country seemed ready to move on to other battles. Yet financial analysts and Fedesarrollo kept pointing at something the approved reform deliberately left untouched: the retirement age, which remains at 57 for women and 62 for men, a threshold that many experts call too low to sustain the system as Colombia’s population ages and life expectancy rises.
So the same question that the 2024 reform avoided has returned with new urgency ahead of the 2026 presidential election, forcing the country to decide whether it will address the demographic reality now or wait until the fiscal pressure becomes impossible to ignore.
Understanding why the retirement age matters requires a short look at what the approved reform actually changed. The new system reorganized pensions into four pillars, or levels, according to how much workers earn, requiring all Colombians to contribute to the public fund Colpensiones on earnings up to 2.3 times the monthly minimum wage, while workers earning more can direct the excess into private savings funds that complement the public tier.
That structure expands coverage for low-income workers and helps fund a minimum monthly payment for older Colombian people who never accumulated enough contribution weeks, addressing one of the system’s most glaring inequalities.
However, none of those pillars change the fundamental math of how long people pay in versus how long they collect, and Fedesarrollo, one of Colombia’s leading economic research centers, warns that the country will need to revisit the retirement age in the near term precisely because of that math.
Colombian pensions: the demographic clock is ticking
Research centers’ argument on Colombian pensions rests on a straightforward demographic trend: Colombians are living longer, the working-age population is growing more slowly than the retired population, and that imbalance will intensify significantly as the children of Colombia’s 1960s and 1970s population boom reach their late fifties and sixties over the coming decade.
Fedesarrollo proposed raising the male retirement age from 62 to 65, and the female retirement age from 57 to 60, and it aligned that proposal with the timeline the Petro government itself acknowledged: that around 2040, Colombia will need a separate demographic reform that addresses the retirement age.
That timeline may sound distant, but preparing a pension system for a population shift takes years of gradual adjustment, which means the debate the candidates now face cannot wait until the crisis arrives.
The current system requires men to contribute for 1,300 weeks, equal to roughly 25 years, before reaching pension eligibility at age 62, while women qualify at 57 with 1,300 weeks, though the reform approved in 2024 includes a gradual reduction in the contribution weeks required for women down to 1,000 weeks by 2030.
That reduction in contribution requirements for women makes the system more accessible for workers with interrupted careers, but it also reduces the total contributions flowing in, adding more weight to the argument that the age threshold will eventually need to rise to compensate.
What each candidate proposes
Iván Cepeda, the left-wing candidate from the Historic Pact, represents the tradition of the Petro government, which consistently rejected raising the retirement age and instead focused on expanding access by easing contribution requirements and strengthening the public Colpensiones fund.
His government plan does not mention age increases and instead defends the idea of making the system more flexible so that more informal and lower-income workers can reach pension eligibility. Yet the same government acknowledged in public that 2040 will likely bring a necessary demographic review, meaning the left’s position delays rather than dismisses the structural adjustment.
Abelardo de la Espriella, the far-right independent candidate, rules out any pension age increase in the short term and instead proposes a counter-reform, meaning a reversal of Petro’s changes, focused on protecting workers’ individual savings in private funds from what his camp describes as state intervention.
His plan also includes expanding the economic subsidy for older people who live in vulnerability and did not accumulate enough contributions for a full pension, broadening the safety net without touching the structural architecture.
Paloma Valencia, from the Democratic Center, takes the position closest to what analysts like Fedesarrollo recommend but stops short of committing to specific numbers. Valencia acknowledges that demographic pressures require a serious review and argues that the system urgently needs more contributors and more resources to fund the pensions that Colpensiones already owes, making the sustainability problem explicit, yet her published government plan does not specify a new retirement age or a timeline for adjustment.
Her proposal focuses instead on strengthening individual savings from an early age, arguing that building private capital from childhood reduces the pressure on the public system over the long term.
A decision no one wants to make first
The gap between what experts recommend and what candidates propose reflects a political reality that goes beyond Colombia: raising the retirement age is one of the most unpopular policy decisions any government can announce, and the country already lived through the social unrest that erupted in 2021, partly in response to pension and labor policy discussions.
That history makes every candidate cautious, but it does not change the arithmetic that Fedesarrollo and other researchers keep pointing at, which is that a system designed for the demographic structure of the 1990s will face mounting strain as Colombia’s population ages through the 2030s and 2040s.
The incoming president will therefore inherit a reformed system that expanded coverage and improved access, but one that still carries an unresolved structural tension between retirement ages set in law and the demographic reality taking shape in real time.
Whether Colombia addresses that tension early, through a gradual and planned adjustment, or late, through a crisis-driven intervention, will depend less on what the candidates say during the campaign and more on how willing the winner is to have an honest conversation with the country once the election is over.