Career Change at 40: A Realistic Guide

Turning 40 still leaves most people about a quarter of a century of paid work, so a career change at 40 is not too late. Across OECD countries, the average normal retirement age is about 64 to 65 and rising.¹ Two things weigh more than the birthday itself: how the move is financed and how you show an employer you can learn. A realistic plan has four parts:

1. Test the field cheaply
2. Look for a bridge role
3. Retrain around your working week
4. Count your money runway

Hiring does get harder in midlife, and a household’s costs make mistakes more expensive than they were in your thirties. This guide assumes you are already leaning toward a move; if you are unsure whether you should change careers at all, settle that question first.

Is 40 too old to change careers?

Forty is not too old to change careers, judged by how long people keep working and how often they still move. The OECD’s 2025 pensions report puts the average normal retirement age at about 64 to 65 for people retiring in 2024 and about 66 for those starting work now, with wide differences between countries.¹

A year or two of retraining is a large share of the few years left before a planned exit, and a small share of a quarter century. A procurement officer in her early forties who expects to work into her mid-sixties has more working years ahead of her than behind her.

Job moves keep happening at this age as well. A US government panel survey that has followed Americans born from 1957 to 1964 for decades found they held about three jobs on average in the decade from their mid-thirties, and about two in the decade after that.² The survey, run by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, counts a job as a spell with one employer, and a job spanning two age bands counts in both, so the figures include moves within a field and jobs already held; even so, changing work in your forties is ordinary.

Judge the cost of retraining against the working years you expect to have left.

Where age starts to count in hiring

Age does start to count against job applicants in their forties, according to a large Swedish field experimentfield experiment: An experiment run in a real setting, such as a workplace, shop or website, with people going about their ordinary lives, usually with random assignment. It shows how an effect plays out in practice, though often for one setting and one group at a time.Full entry in the glossary by economists Magnus Carlsson and Stefan Eriksson. Callbacks for fictitious applicants started to fall early in the age range they tested, and the authors concluded that age discrimination affects workers already in their early forties in many occupations.³

The study

Moderate evidence

How a birth year on a resume changed callbacks in Sweden

The researchers sent fictitious resumes with randomly assigned ages between 35 and 70 to employers advertising real vacancies, in jobs such as administrative assistant, chef, sales representative and truck driver. On average, each extra year of age cut the callback rate by about half a percentage point, so ten years cost about five points. The drop was steeper for women. A survey of employers pointed to stereotypes about older applicants’ ability to learn new tasks, their flexibility and their ambition.³

The study covered common jobs in one country, and every fictitious applicant had years of experience in the occupation applied for, so it does not measure career changers directly. A large US resume experiment by David Neumark, Ian Burn and Patrick Button found lower callback rates in lower-skill jobs for middle-aged and older applicants than for those around 30, with the strongest evidence for older women.⁴ A 2023 review of hiring experiments, most of them European, found the same pattern: applicants from 40 upward got fewer callbacks than those aged 29 to 35, and the gap tended to grow with age, though some studies carried a moderate to high risk of bias.⁵

A career changer in her forties is asking a hiring manager to bet on learning, which is exactly what the Swedish employers doubted. Recent, visible work in the new field (a finished course project, a portfolio piece, a reference from someone you worked with in the new field) can address that doubt better than a long list of past titles.

Laws against age discrimination differ from country to country. In the US, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act protects applicants and employees aged 40 or older at employers with 20 or more staff, as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission explains.⁶ In Great Britain, the Equality Act 2010 makes age a protected characteristic, and the protection covers work.⁷⁸ Northern Ireland has separate age rules that also cover recruitment.⁹ Across the EU, the Employment Equality Directive adopted in 2000 bans age discrimination in recruitment and vocational training, while letting member states justify some age-based differences in their own laws.¹⁰ Elsewhere, check your own country’s rules on age in hiring. The experiments suggest age bias in hiring persists despite such laws, so plan as if you will need to prove your learning, whatever the law says.

Where the “82% succeed” figure comes from

The claim that most people who change careers later in life succeed, often quoted as 82 percent, traces to a 2015 report by the American Institute for Economic Research, a US non-profit. The institute surveyed 405 US adults who had tried to change career after the age of 45, and that share said the change worked.¹¹

Myth

82% of people who change careers at 40 or later succeed, so the odds are on your side.

Fact

The figure comes from one 2015 US survey of 405 people aged 47 or older, and success meant getting the new job.

Three details in the report change how far the figure travels. The survey was run online in January 2014 by the research firm GfK, and fewer than one in ten of the people first invited into its panel ended up answering it. Success was defined by the screening question “did you get the job?”, answered from memory, sometimes years later. And people who thought about a change but never tried one were not counted at all.¹¹

The figure works as encouragement; it cannot tell you your own chances. The same report holds more useful findings: those who succeeded tended to use skills from their old careers, and about three in ten saw their income fall after the move.¹¹

A bootcamp page that leads with “82% succeed” is describing people who had already tried a move, judged by whether they landed the job. Before paying for a course on the strength of a success rate, ask the seller who was counted, how success was defined and what happened to pay afterwards.

What changes compared with your thirties

The biggest differences between changing careers in your thirties and in your forties are financial: pay is often near its highest point, and more people depend on it. In UK official data for April 2025 (provisional), full-time employees in their forties had the highest median annual pay of any age group, at about £44,000, against about £40,700 for those in their thirties.¹²

US data show the same flattening from another angle. In the BLS survey, inflation-adjusted hourly pay grew by about 2 percent a year from the mid-thirties to the mid-forties and barely at all in the decade after.² Leaving a field in your forties can mean giving up pay near its peak, while the raises you forgo are smaller than they would have been a decade earlier. Our guide to changing careers in your thirties explains why pay tied to years in an occupation stays behind when you switch.

Pension saving is easy to leave out of the sums. Under UK auto-enrolment rules (as of 2026), an employer has to pay at least 3 percent of an enrolled worker’s earnings (in most schemes, earnings within a set yearly band) into a workplace pension, so a gap between jobs or a spell of self-employment pauses that money as well as your own.¹³ For US readers, the SEC’s Investor.gov suggests asking before a switch whether paychecks will stop for a while, how you would pay for that stretch, and when the old insurance and benefits run out and the new ones start.¹⁴

A household also changes the stakes. A warehouse manager in his forties with two children at school and a mortgage cannot take the long unpaid gap a single person ten years younger might; the same move has to be staged, tested and financed. Pension, benefit and insurance rules vary between countries; your own provider or regulator can tell you which apply.

A career change at 40 without wrecking the family budget

In your forties, the safest route into a new field keeps an income running while you test, learn and build proof. Our full career-change roadmap covers the whole sequence; the four steps below are the ones that change most when a household depends on your pay.

Test the field cheaply

Spend a few days finding out what the work is like before you pay for training. A day of job shadowing as an adult, a weekend of freelance work or a few conversations with people in the role cost little and can end a bad idea early. Aim for a clear yes or no about the daily work.

Look for a bridge role

A bridge role uses what you already know while moving you closer to the new field: the procurement officer moves into supplier analytics before data science, or a teacher into training design before instructional technology. The AIER survey found that the people who succeeded tended to move into work that used skills from their old careers.¹¹ Start from the skills that carry across jobs and pick the first role that pays for them.

Retrain around your working week

You can go back to school at 40, and plenty of people train at this age. In the BLS survey, roughly two in five respondents received some training in the ten years from age 41, outside regular degree schooling.² In the EU in 2022, most job-related training outside formal education at ages 35 to 44 was employer-sponsored (paid at least partly by the employer or done in paid hours), according to Eurostat’s Adult Education Survey.¹⁵

That makes your current employer the first place to look. A short course or certificate that your employer funds, taken in evenings or on a study day, keeps your income and your benefits running. Our guide to tuition reimbursement explains how employer funding works and what strings tend to come with it. A full degree is worth it mainly when the new field requires one for a license or entry, and that varies by country.

Count your money runway

Your runway is the number of months your savings cover essential household costs, after training fees and any gap between paychecks. Write down rent or mortgage, childcare and school costs, insurance you would have to replace, debt repayments and the pension contributions that would pause, then divide your savings by that monthly figure.

If the runway is short, the usual levers are time and scope: train longer while employed, aim first for a bridge role, or agree a smaller budget with anyone who shares it.

1. Household costs set the length: count rent or mortgage, dependants, insurance and any gap between paychecks before course fees
2. Pension saving is part of pay: in the UK (as of 2026), employers must pay at least 3% of an auto-enrolled worker's earnings into a pension, and a gap pauses that too
3. Pay is often near its high point: in UK data for 2025, full-time employees in their 40s had the highest median pay of any age group
4. Training can come through work: in the EU in 2022, most job-related training outside formal education at ages 35 to 44 was employer-sponsored

Run through this checklist before you hand in notice.

Before you resign

• At least one day spent watching or doing the new work
• One bridge role identified that pays for skills I already have
• Training chosen that fits alongside my current job
• Employer funding asked about before paying for a course
• Monthly household costs, debts and paused pension saving added up
• Runway in months written down and agreed with anyone who shares the budget

The evidence behind this guide ranges from official statistics to a single survey.

Who can check your plan and your rights

Have someone outside the household check your figures before you resign or commit to a large course fee. An adviser who charges a flat fee and is regulated where you live can check the runway and the pension gap. For US questions about rolling old retirement savings into a new account, Investor.gov directs readers to the Department of Labor’s Employee Benefits Security Administration.¹⁴

UK readers can use the Money and Pensions Service, sponsored by the UK government, which offers impartial guidance on money, debt and pensions at no charge.¹⁶ Readers elsewhere can ask their financial regulator or a free debt-advice service for regulated help.

If you believe an employer turned you down because of your age, the route differs by country. US applicants can turn to the EEOC, which says a charge generally has to be filed within 180 days, longer in some states.⁶ In Great Britain, GOV.UK’s guide to discrimination rights suggests raising it informally with the employer first, then talking to Acas, Citizens Advice or a trade union representative.⁷ In Northern Ireland, nidirect points to the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland.⁹ Elsewhere, contact your national equality body.

The bottom line

Forty leaves enough working years for a new career, but a household budget leaves little room for an expensive mistake. Before you resign, spend a day in the new work, find a bridge role, and write down how many months of household costs your savings cover.