With this impending milestone set to tax the resources of the Social Security Administration at a level not yet experienced in the system's 84-year-existence, researchers at the St. Louis Fed shared a few calculations that not only showed how many people can be expected to file for retirement benefits in the years between now and 2025, but also how economists should take this information into account when evaluating the performance of the labor market.

Guillaume Vandenbroucke, the research officer and economist who published the information on the St. Louis Fed's "On The Economy Blog," demonstrated how official BLS data tend to understate the performance of the labor market when the number of people retiring is high, because the 'net' employment figure subtracts the number of people retiring.

To estimate the number of future retirees, Vandenbroucke started with the population of workers between the ages of 40 and 65 in 2018 using data gathered by IPUMS-USA. He then adjusted for age- and gender-specific mortality rates from the Human Mortality Database.