Abstract: The aging population and the prolongation of people’s life expectancy have posed threats to China’s workers basic pension insurance system; to extend the retirement age is one of the possible measures to relieve the fund payment pressure. By constructing a population predictive model and a pension balance model, this paper designs 11 kinds of retirement age plans and calculates the impact of different programs on the balance of payments of the pension insurance fund. The results of the calculation show that to extend the retirement age can delay the coming of pension gap, which will improve the solvency of the fund to some extent. It also proposes to extend the retirement age to 65 for both men and women, to lay emphasis on flexible retirement, and to increase the protection for older workers.

Key words: extending retirement age; pooling funds; balance of payment; life expectancy; fund gap