Too Old for This Job? Age Limits in Job Ads
Media briefing, July 2026
Before 2004, Austrian employers could state explicit age limits in job advertisements, and one in three postings included them. This study analyzes these age requirements and what happened when they were outlawed. After the ban, jobs that had previously imposed age limits attracted more older applicants and hired more older workers, while wages, job durations and vacancy filling times remained unchanged.
Key findings
- Before the ban, one third of vacancies on Austria's largest job board specified a maximum age for applicants. Most limits lay between 40 and 55 years, with an average of 44.
- Age limits were most common and most restrictive in clerical, business and ICT occupations, and they were stricter in occupations with faster changes in skill requirements. This suggests that employers avoid older applicants because they expect their skills to be outdated.
- After the ban, previously restrictive jobs saw a rise in both the share of applicants and the share of hires older than 45, with substantially larger increases among jobs that had imposed the strictest limits.
- Earnings, job durations, sickness absences and vacancy filling times did not change. There is no evidence that the ban lowered worker productivity or raised recruitment costs.
- Employers adjusted the wording of their ads. Explicit references to young became less common, while attributes associated with younger workers, such as dynamic or energetic, appeared more often.
Why it matters
Workforces are ageing and retirement ages are rising, yet older jobseekers stay unemployed much longer than younger ones. In OECD countries, the share of workers aged 55 and over among the long-term unemployed is about 12 percentage points higher than that of younger workers. One explanation is that employers are reluctant to hire older applicants, but such preferences are usually difficult to observe. Age limits in job ads make them visible.
What the study does
The analysis is based on vacancies posted between 2000 and 2010 on the job board of the Austrian public employment service, which covers about half of all vacancies in the country. The data record the stated age requirements, the applications of registered jobseekers and the eventual hires, who can be followed in social security records. To evaluate the ban, the study compares jobs that would likely have imposed strong age limits, as predicted from the pre-ban behavior of the same firm and occupation, with jobs that rarely used such limits.
The bottom line
Many employers appear to hold overly pessimistic beliefs about older workers. Once explicit age limits disappeared, previously restrictive jobs received more applications from older workers and hired more of them. These hires earned similar wages, stayed just as long and were not sick more often.
The findings suggest that banning discriminatory job advertisements is a low-cost policy that improves labor market access for older workers without lowering hiring efficiency. Such bans are also comparatively easy to enforce, since violations are visible in the posting itself. At the same time, the strict limits that employers set when this was still permitted suggest that the overall extent of age discrimination in hiring is substantially larger than job postings alone reveal.
The findings are based on the study "Too Old for This Job? Evidence from Age Requirements in Job Postings" by Lennart Ziegler. Contact: ZieglerL@ceu.edu. [www.lennartziegler.com]