Life expectancy has risen; whether healthy life expectancy has kept pace is the question, and the answer differs by country and by how health is measured. In the UK, healthy life expectancy stalled around 2011 and has since fallen for women, widening the years spent in poor health, and the gap between the most and least deprived areas is of the order of two decades. Elsewhere the picture is mixed: some European series show compression of morbidity, others expansion, and the measures are self-reported, which makes comparison across cultures hazardous. The second half of the question is newer. Most high-income countries are raising the state pension age, and the health effects of working longer are contested: some studies find benefits for cognition and mortality, others find harm among manual workers and those in poor health, and the natural experiments created by pension reforms are only now producing results. The evidence supports neither the claim that the extra years are healthy nor the claim that they are not.