I am only 43, but on YouTube I get pushed lots of videos about retiring overseas. Does YouTube know that I’ve had enough of the Melbourne winter? 

The argument made in these videos for a retirement in a low-cost tropical paradise is simple – your limited retirement income carries you further in the Philippines, Bali or Thailand.

These retirement videos usually involve views of tropical beaches, affordable restaurants, sunshine, and a suspiciously large number of massages. 

This brings us to today’s column. How many Aussies actually retire overseas and where do they go to?

As a demographer, I naturally turned to the data to answer this question. What I discovered surprised me. 

It turns out that our overseas retirement story has much less to do with tropical beaches and much more to do with the great migration waves that shaped postwar Australia. 

Following the pension money 

The first problem is that Australia doesn’t keep a comprehensive register of people retiring overseas that I can just download. 

We know how many people leave the country. We know how many Australians receive the Age Pension. But we don’t systematically record who has packed up their belongings, sold the family home and decided to spend retirement in another country. 

Fortunately, the Department of Social Services provides a useful starting point. 

Recently-released government data show that 77,432 people were receiving an Australian Age Pension while located overseas on December 31, 2025. 

The Commonwealth was sending these pensioners a combined $35 million a fortnight.  

That sounds like a substantial amount of money travelling around the world, but only translates to $452 per person per fortnight. Hardly enough to get by on in Newcastle or Toowoomba, let alone Sydney. 

But where is that money going? 

New Zealand tops the list with 21,416 pension recipients. Greece comes second with 9187, followed by Italy with 6994. 

Tiny Malta accounts for another 3009 recipients, Spain has 2568, the Netherlands 1645, Croatia 1603 and North Macedonia 1415. 

Germany, Portugal and Britain also feature prominently. 

The typical overseas pension destination looks rather different from the YouTube videos I am seeing. 

Together, New Zealand, Greece and Italy account for almost half (49 per cent) of all Australian Age Pension recipients recorded overseas. 

Now let’s look at the tropical retirement destinations. 

Thailand had 730 recipients, the Philippines 659 and Indonesia just 134. Malaysia had a mere 52. 

Put differently, there were about 14 times as many Australian Age Pension recipients in New Zealand as in Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia combined. 

Bali might dominate YouTube retirement fantasies, but it certainly doesn’t dominate the pension statistics. 

Of course, these numbers don’t capture self-funded retirees, who might well be more inclined to relocate to cheaper Asian destinations. Nevertheless, the geographical pattern is striking. 

Australia’s migration history in reverse 

Why are Greece, Italy, Malta and other European countries so prominent? 

The answer lies in Australia’s postwar immigration history.

From the late 1940s onwards, Australia welcomed enormous numbers of European migrants. Italians, Greeks, Maltese, Dutch and other migrants arrived to work in factories, build infrastructure, establish businesses and raise families. 

They helped transform Australia from a relatively homogeneous British outpost into the multicultural country we know today. 

Many spent their entire working lives here. They paid Australian taxes, raised Australian children, bought Australian homes, added columns to front porches and gradually accumulated Australian superannuation entitlements. 

For many the emotional connection to their countries of birth never entirely disappeared. 

For some, retirement offers the opportunity to complete the circle. 

After decades in Melbourne or Sydney, they return to a Greek village, an Italian town or the Mediterranean island where they grew up. 

Perhaps they inherited a family property. Perhaps their siblings still live there. Maybe they simply prefer the food, climate or familiar language. 

An ageing migrant might have spent 50 years building a life in Australia while continuing to think of somewhere else as home. 

What looks like international retirement migration in our statistics is therefore often (much delayed) return migration. 

This distinction matters enormously. 

We shouldn’t automatically interpret Australians retiring overseas as people rejecting Australia because housing, healthcare or everyday expenses have become too expensive. 

For many, the decision is likely about family, culture and identity rather than money alone. 

A disappearing generation? 

The historical data reveal another fascinating development. 

In December 2020, Australia had 91,825 Age Pension recipients recorded overseas. By December 2025, that number had declined to 77,432. That’s a fall of almost 16 per cent in five years. 

The decline is particularly noticeable in some of the traditional European destinations. 

Italy dropped from 11,378 pension recipients in 2020 to 6994 in 2025, a reduction of 39 per cent. 

Greece fell from 11,977 to 9187, while the Netherlands declined from 2671 to 1645. 

New Zealand, however, remained remarkably stable at around 21,000 recipients. 

What explains these changes? 

We cannot identify the precise causes from these pension figures alone. But one plausible explanation is the gradual passing of Australia’s great postwar European migrant generation. 

Someone arriving in Australia as a young adult in the 1950s or 1960s would now be well into their 80s or 90s, assuming they are still alive. 

As this generation ages and passes away, the number of Australian pension recipients living in their countries of origin might naturally decline. 

Some recipients may also have returned to Australia, while administrative and eligibility factors could affect the totals. 

The important point is that a shrinking overseas pension caseload doesn’t necessarily mean that today’s retirees have lost interest in retiring abroad. 

It might simply reflect the changing demographic composition of the people who have historically done so. 

This is a classic example of how migration decisions made many decades ago continue to shape our population statistics today. 

The retirees we cannot see 

Before getting carried away with these numbers, we need to acknowledge a rather significant limitation. 

The 77,432 figure does not represent all Australians who have retired overseas. 

It captures a defined group of Age Pension recipients recorded outside Australia under particular payment arrangements. 

Nearly 15,000 recipients in the 2025 data didn’t even have a specific overseas country recorded. 

More importantly, the pension figures miss entire categories of retirees. 

A wealthy Australian who sells their Melbourne house, invests the proceeds and retires comfortably in Thailand might never receive a cent of Age Pension. They wouldn’t appear in our overseas pension statistics. 

The same applies to someone who retires at 60 and lives off superannuation until becoming eligible for the Age Pension at 67, or who remains entirely self-funded throughout retirement. 

We also need to remember that receiving an Australian pension doesn’t automatically mean someone is an Australian citizen, or that they would describe themselves as having retired from Australia. 

Australia has social security agreements with 32 countries, making it possible for eligible people to access pensions across borders. 

Even the pension amounts themselves can change when someone moves overseas. After 26 weeks, the rate generally depends partly on how many years the recipient lived in Australia between age 16 and pension age. 

So, these figures are a useful window into retirement migration, not a complete census. 

Could our beloved Australian Bureau of Statistics be of help? 

To some extent. 

In 2024-25, the ABS counted 263,000 migrant departures from Australia across all ages. These are people who leave Australia for at least 12 months within a 16-month period. 

We could isolate departures aged 65 or 67 and over, then examine where they are going. 

That would give us another important piece of the puzzle. 

But even then, we’d be measuring older people moving overseas, not necessarily people retiring. 

Some might be joining children overseas. Others might be relocating for health reasons, returning to their country of birth or even continuing to work. 

Superannuation data could theoretically help, but there is no straightforward public dataset tracking every Australian retiree’s subsequent country of residence. 

For a nation that loves counting things, we are surprisingly poor at counting our overseas retirees. 

Where will the next generation retire? 

The really interesting question isn’t simply where today’s retirees live, but where tomorrow’s retirees might choose to spend their later years. 

Australia’s migrant population has changed dramatically over the past few decades. 

The postwar European migration waves gave way to migrants from India, China, the Philippines, and other parts of Asia. 

As these newer migrant cohorts reach retirement age, we might reasonably expect the geography of retirement migration to change too. 

Perhaps future Australian pension statistics will show a much greater concentration of recipients in India, China and Southeast Asia. 

At the same time, locally born Australians might increasingly consider international retirement options for reasons of lifestyle and affordability. 

The ability to maintain family connections through video calls, access Australian bank accounts remotely and travel internationally makes a cross-border retirement more practical than it once was. 

Still, retirement isn’t an endless holiday. 

Healthcare, family proximity, language, taxation, social connections and access to support become increasingly important as people age. 

The cheapest country isn’t automatically the best place to grow old. 

For policymakers, there are interesting questions here about pension portability, ageing migrant communities and the consequences of an increasingly internationally mobile older population. 

For demographers, there’s also a broader lesson: We tend to discuss migration as something that happens when people are young – I’ve called 18-39 the migration age many times in my columns. That’s when students arrive, workers relocate, and families settle. 

But migration doesn’t necessarily end when working life does. 

Some people migrate twice. Others spend their lives moving between two countries. Some retire in the very village their grandparents left decades earlier. 

Australia’s migration story doesn’t simply stop at retirement age. Sometimes, after half a century of calling Australia home, it leads right back to where it began. 

Simon Kuestenmacher is a co-founder of The Demographics Group. His columns, media commentary and public speaking focus on current socio-demographic trends and how these impact Australia. His podcast, Demographics Decoded, explores the world through the demographic lens. Follow Simon on Twitter (X), Facebook, or LinkedIn.