Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
60 free Retirement Party trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
53 free retirement party trivia questions with answers. Looking for trivia questions for a retirement party that are actually about retirement? This set is built for the send-off itself: a round the whole office or family can play between the cake and the speeches. The questions cover where the whole idea came from (Bismarck's 1889 pension, Augustus's veterans, Britain's five shillings a week), the American machinery of retirement (Social Security's first cheque, the 401(k), the IRA, Medicare, AARP), the places retirees go (Sun City, The Villages, the snowbird migration), the films and shows about life after work (Cocoon, The Golden Girls, About Schmidt, Up, The Bucket List) and the famous people who retired well, badly or repeatedly, from Michael Jordan and Rocky Marciano to Johnny Carson and a pope. Most questions are easy enough for a mixed crowd; a few (Ida May Fuller's tax bill, Sun City's ghost-town name, the Studebaker pension collapse) will separate the finance department from everyone else. Read them aloud, print them, or let the guest of honour play. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries and each question shows the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which country was the first to introduce state retirement benefits, in 1889?
Germany
Otto von Bismarck's scheme originally set the pension age at 70, when few workers lived that long.
Q 02What was the original retirement age under Bismarck's 1889 German pension law?
70
It was cut to 65 in 1916, the figure many countries then copied.
Q 03Which Roman emperor is credited with the first recorded state pension, for army veterans, in 13 BC?
Augustus
Legionaries had to serve 16 years plus four in the reserves to qualify, later raised to 20 and five.
Q 04Which US president signed the Social Security Act on August 14, 1935?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
The 37-page act also created unemployment insurance and aid to dependent children.
Q 05Ida May Fuller of Vermont was the first person to receive what, in 1940?
A monthly Social Security cheque
She had paid just $24.75 in Social Security taxes over three years and lived to be 100, collecting for 35 years.
Q 06How much had Ida May Fuller paid in Social Security taxes before claiming her first benefit?
$24.75
She stopped by the Rutland office 'to ask about benefits' and ended up receiving cheques for the next 35 years.
Q 07The 401(k) retirement plan takes its name from what?
A section of the US tax code
Congress enacted the section in the late 1970s, and Hughes Aircraft was advised how to use it within three weeks.
Q 08Section 401(k) was added to the US tax code in which year?
1978
An outside lawyer's letter to Hughes Aircraft three weeks later became the first known 401(k) plan.
Q 09The 1974 law known as ERISA created which tax-advantaged savings account?
The IRA
Savers could put in 15 percent of income or $1,500 a year, whichever was less.
Q 10Which carmaker's 1963 plant closure, stranding workers' pensions, spurred US pension reform?
Studebaker
The South Bend, Indiana shutdown helped drive the passage of ERISA in 1974.
Q 11The Roth IRA, created in 1997, is named after what?
A US senator
Delaware's William Roth sponsored it as part of the Taxpayer Relief Act.
Q 12AARP was founded in 1958 by which retired California educator?
Ethel Percy Andrus
Its magazine and bulletin are the two largest-circulation publications in the United States.
Q 13At what age can Americans join AARP?
50
It claimed more than 38 million members as of 2018.
Q 14Medicare, health insurance for Americans 65 and older, began in which year?
Q 21Ryderwood, Washington, the oldest continuously running US retirement community, began life as what?
A logging camp
Long-Bell set it up in 1923 and Senior Estates converted it into a retirement town in 1953.
Q 22Retirees who head south each winter to escape the cold are commonly known as what?
Snowbirds
A 'sunbird' is the reverse: someone who flees a hot summer for cooler, higher ground.
Q 23Britain's Old Age Pensions Act of 1908 paid single claimants over 70 how much a week?
Five shillings
Couples with a husband over 70 got seven shillings and sixpence; the act came in H. H. Asquith's budget.
1965
It started under the Social Security Administration and now covers around 65 million people.
Q 15Which lettered section of Medicare covers self-administered prescription drugs?
D
Part A covers hospital and hospice care, Part B outpatient services and Part C the private Medicare Advantage plans.
Q 16On what date did Sun City, Arizona, Del Webb's first purpose-built retirement community, open?
January 1, 1960
Some 100,000 people came the opening weekend, ten times the forecast, and Time put it on the cover.
Q 17Before building Sun City, Del Webb was co-owner of which New York sports franchise?
The Yankees
He and Dan Topping owned the club from 1945 to 1964, a stretch that included 15 World Series appearances and 10 titles.
Q 18Sun City was built on the site of a former ghost town called what?
Marinette
It was briefly the Marinette Retirement Community until a naming contest, whose winner got a house, produced Sun City.
Q 19The Villages, the vast Florida retirement community, grew out of a mobile-home park with what name?
Orange Blossom Gardens
Harold Schwartz had started out selling the land by mail order until a 1968 federal law banned the practice.
Q 20The Villages sits in central Florida roughly 45 miles northwest of which city?
Orlando
Its census-designated place alone had 79,077 residents in 2020, and golf carts have their own overpasses.
Q 24In Australia and New Zealand, a workplace retirement plan is commonly called what?
Superannuation
The same thing is a 'pension scheme' in Britain and Ireland and a 'retirement plan' in the US.
Q 25Japan's national holiday honouring the elderly, Respect for the Aged Day, falls in which month?
September
It became a national holiday in 1966 and moved from the 15th to the third Monday of the month in 2003.
Q 26A retired professor who keeps the use of their title is styled what?
Emeritus
The feminine form is emerita.
Q 27What is a 'golden handshake'?
A large severance package for a departing executive
The term was coined in Britain in the mid-1960s by Daily Express city editor Frederick Ellis.
Q 28The four retired women of The Golden Girls shared a house in which city?
Miami
All four leads won Emmys, one of only four sitcoms where every principal cast member has done so.
Q 29In the 1985 film Cocoon, a group of Florida retirees are rejuvenated by what?
Aliens
Ron Howard directed, and Don Ameche won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for it at 77.
Q 30Which two actors play the terminally ill men on a road trip in The Bucket List (2007)?
Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman
Rob Reiner directed; the title has since become everyday shorthand for a to-do-before-you-die list.