Americans Over 50 Generated $12.5 Trillion in 2024. Corporate America Is Still Pricing Them as a Cost.

Americans age 50 and older generated an estimated $12.5 trillion in U.S. economic activity in 2024 — roughly 43% of GDP — yet most companies still build growth plans around a model that treats aging as decline, argues Richard B. Schenkel, founder and CEO of Phoenix3 Collective LLC, in a MarketWatch opinion column.

The number comes from AARP's 2026 Longevity Economy Outlook. It's up from $8.3 trillion in 2018, and AARP projects it will nearly double again, to $24 trillion by 2060. If the 50-plus cohort were a country, Schenkel notes, it would be the third-largest economy on earth, trailing only the U.S. and China.

That's the scale corporate America is mispricing, he writes: a trillion-dollar error baked into capital allocation, product road maps and marketing budgets.

How big is the 50-plus economy?

The headline figure anchors a cohort most strategy decks still file under cost. AARP's research shows the 50-plus population's economic contribution indirectly sustains 98 million U.S. jobs across every age group — not just their own.

The demographic shift is real on the labor side too. Workers 65 and older now make up roughly 8% of the U.S. workforce, more than double their share 25 years ago. By 2050, 1 in 4 Americans will be over 65.

But the headwind framing hides the more consequential story, Schenkel argues: millions of older Americans are extending the years in which they travel, spend, relocate and participate in the economy — with real discretionary power behind them. "The biggest misconception about aging is that it represents a story of decline," he writes. "Increasingly, it is becoming a story of demand."

Where are older consumers actually outspending?

The spending data directly challenge the fixed-income skeptic's case. Boomers now lead all generations in discretionary spending in two categories that define modern consumer businesses:

• Travel: 41% of discretionary allocation
• Restaurants: 36% of discretionary allocation

Those figures come from recent Qualtrics and McKinsey consumer research. AARP's 2026 travel survey adds more: 86% of adults 50 and older ranked vacations among their top three discretionary spending priorities this year, ahead of dining out and entertainment. And Boomer households spent more per trip on average than millennial households in 2024, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer-expenditure data.

Schenkel's line on this is blunt: "A generation being written off as a cost center is outspending younger generations in the exact categories companies compete hardest to win."

Why hasn't corporate strategy caught up?

The root problem is architecture, not attitude. Joseph Coughlin, director of the MIT AgeLab and author of "The Longevity Economy," has argued for years that businesses keep imagining older consumers as static and homogenous, when the reality is a market as dynamic and varied as any other.

Most consumer strategy still sits on a lifecycle model in which spending, ambition and reinvention taper off around retirement. That model drives how companies size markets, allocate marketing budgets and plan real estate. It was reasonable when it was built, Schenkel writes — but it "quietly expired years ago," and companies that have only updated their messaging, not the model, are making growth decisions on stale demographic assumptions.

The correction is already visible at the state level. AARP's 2026 data show the 50-plus population share now exceeds the national average in 29 states, a shift reshaping state economies and labor markets well beyond any single industry.

What does fixing the model look like?

Schenkel points to three recalibrations — not three new marketing campaigns:

• Stop treating older consumers as a footnote and start building the model around them as a primary market segment, the way travel and hospitality brands are increasingly doing in response to the spending data.
• Stop measuring the population by what it costs the system and start measuring what it contributes — a reframe AARP's research makes hard to ignore at $12.5 trillion.
• Stop hard-coding relevance decay into the model as a function of age, when the data show what actually changes is where and how that relevance shows up.

None of this requires abandoning younger demographics or reinventing a business overnight, he writes. It requires updating a model with the same discipline any good leader applies when the data stop matching the story.

The gap between the decline model and the demand reality, now measured in trillions, will close the way these gaps typically do, Schenkel writes: companies that reprice early capture disproportionate value, while those running the old model are left explaining what happened. His closer: "The only open question is which companies will update the model before their competitors do."

By Grace Kim