Retirement Party Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
110 free Retirement Party trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 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 110 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which country was the first to introduce state retirement benefits, in 1889?
Germany
Germany. Otto von Bismarck, a conservative chancellor, backed old-age pensions largely to draw workers away from the socialist movement.
Q 02Which Roman emperor retired in 305 to an Adriatic palace now at the centre of Split, Croatia?
Diocletian
Diocletian. Asked to return to power, he is said to have replied that nobody who saw the cabbages he had planted with his own hands would ask.
Q 03Which Roman emperor set up a state pension for army veterans in 13 BC?
Augustus
Augustus. In one of the earliest pension schemes on record, veterans got a lump sum after 16 years in a legion and four in reserve, and he later created inheritance and sales taxes to pay for it.
Q 04Which US president signed the Social Security Act on August 14, 1935?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted workers pay in through payroll taxes so that, as he put it, no politician could ever scrap the programme.
Q 05Ida May Fuller of Vermont was the first person to receive what, in 1940?
A monthly Social Security cheque
A monthly Social Security cheque. Fuller, a retired legal secretary, had paid in for about three years; she lived to 100 and collected $22,888.92.
Q 06Which country saw months of strikes in 2023 over a law raising its retirement age from 62 to 64?
France
France. President Emmanuel Macron's government pushed the change through without a final vote in the National Assembly, using the constitution's Article 49.3.
Q 07The 401(k) retirement plan takes its name from what?
A section of the US tax code
A section of the US tax code. Benefits consultant Ted Benna spotted that subsection 401(k) could let employees save pre-tax pay, and built a plan around it at his own firm.
Q 08In The Golden Girls, Sophia moves in with her daughter after a fire at which retirement home?
Shady Pines
Shady Pines. Sophia was written as a minor character, but the pilot's audience took to Estelle Getty so strongly that she replaced the planned live-in housekeeper.
Q 09The 1974 law known as ERISA created which tax-advantaged savings account?
The IRA
The IRA. It was meant for workers whose jobs came with no pension plan; only in 1981 did a new tax law open IRAs to every working taxpayer.
Q 10Which carmaker's 1963 plant closure, stranding workers' pensions, spurred US pension reform?
Studebaker
Studebaker. When its South Bend, Indiana, plant shut, thousands of workers lost some or all of their promised pensions, and the outcry led Congress to insure private pensions in 1974.
Q 11Which retirement account is named after the Delaware senator who sponsored it in 1997?
The Roth IRA
The Roth IRA. William Roth and fellow senator Bob Packwood had proposed it in 1989 as the 'IRA Plus', eight years before it passed under his name.
Q 12Which organisation for older Americans did retired high-school principal Ethel Percy Andrus found in 1958?
AARP
AARP. Andrus first organised retired teachers to win them health insurance, then opened the idea to all older Americans.
Q 13Which fictional detective retires to a small farm on the South Downs to keep bees?
Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle has him write a 'Practical Handbook of Bee Culture' in retirement, then use the book to trick a German spy on the eve of the First World War.
Q 21Ryderwood, Washington, a retirement town since 1953, was built in the 1920s to house workers in which industry?
Logging
Logging. The Long-Bell Lumber Company built it as the 'World's Largest Logging Town', then three decades later sold the entire town to a developer who reopened it for retirees.
Q 22Retirees who head south each winter to escape the cold are commonly known as what?
Snowbirds
Snowbirds. The word first meant real birds seen mostly in winter, such as the junco; by the 1920s it was being used for workers who went south for the cold months.
Q 23Britain's first state old-age pensions, paid from 1909, were collected each week at which institution?
The post office
Q 14Which president signed Medicare into law in 1965?
Lyndon B. Johnson
Lyndon B. Johnson travelled to Independence, Missouri, to sign the bill beside Harry Truman, whose own push for national health insurance had failed two decades earlier.
Q 15Which lettered section of Medicare covers self-administered prescription drugs?
D
D. Medicare ran for four decades without a pharmacy benefit; Part D arrived in 2006 and is sold only through private insurers.
Q 16Which fast-food founder sold his roadside restaurant at 65 and took to the road to franchise his recipe?
Colonel Sanders
Colonel Sanders. A new interstate had pulled traffic away from his Kentucky restaurant, so he sold it and drove around signing up restaurants to cook his chicken for a few cents a bird.
Q 17Retirement-town developer Del Webb was once co-owner of which New York sports franchise?
The Yankees
The Yankees. Webb and Dan Topping bought into the club in 1945, saw it win ten World Series, then sold control to the CBS television network in 1964.
Q 18Which Arizona retirement community, opened by Del Webb in 1960, drew 100,000 visitors on its first weekend?
Sun City
Sun City. Home sales ran far ahead of the company's forecasts, and in 1962 Time magazine put its builder on the cover.
Q 19Which animation director announced his retirement in 2013, then came back with a new feature ten years later?
Hayao Miyazaki
Hayao Miyazaki. His producer said he made The Boy and the Heron for his grandson, as a way of saying that Grandpa was moving on but leaving this film behind.
Q 20The Villages, Florida's sprawling retirement community, lies northwest of which city?
Orlando
Orlando. The Villages grew out of a 400-unit mobile-home park run by its founder, who had earlier sold land by mail order.
The post office. Ministers kept the five-shilling pension away from the Poor Law authorities so that collecting it carried no stigma of charity.
Q 24In Australia and New Zealand, a workplace retirement plan is commonly called what?
Superannuation
Superannuation. Australians shorten it to 'super', and in 1992 the Keating government made it compulsory for employers to pay part of each worker's wages into a fund.
Q 25Which country marks Respect for the Aged Day as a public holiday each September?
Japan
Japan. It was fixed on September 15 until 2003, when the 'Happy Monday' reforms moved it to a Monday to give workers a three-day weekend.
Q 26A retired professor who keeps the use of their title is styled what?
Emeritus
Emeritus. In Latin the word described a veteran soldier who had served out his time and earned his discharge.
Q 27In business slang, what is a 'golden handshake'?
A generous severance payment
A generous severance payment. It is often offered to coax someone into early retirement, whereas a 'golden hello' is the bonus paid to lure a new recruit.
Q 28The four older women of The Golden Girls shared a house in which city?
Miami
Miami. Estelle Getty, who played the elderly mother, was in fact a year younger than Bea Arthur, who played her daughter.
Q 29In the 1985 film Cocoon, Florida retirees feel young again after swimming in a pool charged by whom?
Aliens
Aliens. The visitors are using the pool to keep their cocooned companions alive, and the retirees next door keep sneaking in; Don Ameche won an Oscar for his role.
Q 30Which two actors play the terminally ill men in The Bucket List (2007)?
Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman
Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. The phrase 'bucket list', built on 'kick the bucket', was barely recorded before the film: dictionaries date it only to 2006.