A new survey of Central Coast renters aged 55 to 69 has found a retirement cliff forming for people who do not own a home, with almost one in five saying they do not believe they will ever retire. The Home in Place survey of 772 renters shows the housing crisis is already reaching into daily life, with 60 per cent spending more than 30 per cent of their income on rent and a third spending more than 40 per cent.
Martin Kennedy said the results were “shocking, but not surprising”, because the system still assumes older Australians will enter later life with a paid-off home. On the Central Coast, 11,595 people in the 55 to 69 age group were renting at the time of the survey, and Kennedy said the findings show how exposed they are when they reach retirement age without owning property.
The survey paints a bleak picture of what that means. Twenty-seven per cent of respondents expect major financial stress in retirement, while just 8 per cent expect a comfortable one. A third said their superannuation would last less than five years if they had to rely on it while renting, and four in 10 said they definitely could not afford to rent privately on the Age Pension.
The strain is already showing in household budgets. More than half of respondents said they were cutting back on groceries and social connection, and 25 per cent said they were reducing spending on healthcare and medication. Almost three-quarters worry about becoming housing insecure in later life, while one in five already feel insecure in their current home.
Kennedy said there were at least 750,000 Australians who would hit retirement age in the next decade without owning a home. He said the median superannuation balance for people in this age bracket, according to the Australian Taxation Office, sits between $170,000 and $210,000, and warned that median rent alone in any capital city would absorb that amount in less than a decade.
The pressure is more than a local problem. Home ownership, pension settings, superannuation assumptions and housing policy all lean on the same expectation: that retirement comes with low housing costs. For many people in their 50s and 60s, that is no longer true, and the private rental market was never built for people entering old age with no property behind them.
That is the contradiction at the heart of the housing crisis. The official system still plans for renters as if they are temporary, but the survey shows a growing group for whom renting is a permanent reality, and an expensive one. Kennedy said lack of home ownership is one of the strongest predictors of poverty later in life, and the numbers in this survey suggest that warning has already become a forecast.
The question now is not whether older renters are under pressure. They are. The question is whether the retirement system will be redesigned before the next 750,000 Australians reach it without a home of their own.
