If you make aliyah at sixty-five, what does Israel owe you when you retire?

Israel stops insuring a new immigrant for old age at sixty-two. We opened the government's record-level arrivals file and counted how many Americans walk across that line every year.

A couple in their sixties sells the house, ships what fits into a lift, and lands at Ben Gurion holding an immigrant's certificate. Between them they have forty years of American Social Security contributions, and from their first month they will pay Israel's health tax. The reasonable assumption is that the two systems meet somewhere.

They do not. The United States runs bilateral totalization agreements that let a worker add up credits earned in two countries. Thirty countries have one, and Israel has never had one. On the Israeli side, a person who first becomes a resident after a certain birthday is not insured for old age at all.

To keep this concrete we will follow that couple through the piece. He is sixty-five on the day they land and she is sixty-three, both with full American working lives behind them and no Israeli work history at all.

First: where exactly does Israel draw the line?

Almost everything written for American olim gives the threshold as sixty. Nefesh B'Nefesh, the organization most Americans read before moving, says olim arriving over sixty are generally not entitled to the standard Israeli government pension. That number is stale, and stale in the direction that costs people money. Bituach Leumi gives it as sixty-two for men and retirement age for women, and for women there is no single number, because their cutoff is their own retirement age (gil prisha, גיל פרישה), climbing by cohort from sixty-two toward sixty-five.

The reason usually given for the cliff is also wrong. It is described as a failure to accumulate contribution years. In fact the qualifying period (tkufat achshara, תקופת אכשרה) has an alternative formula written for immigrants: sixty months of insurance, provided insured months since becoming a resident outnumber uninsured ones. An oleh who arrives and stays is insured every month, so the test collapses to five years.

Five years is not a demanding bar. A man arriving at sixty-one clears it at sixty-six and collects at sixty-seven. The chart below runs one man in at every age from thirty to seventy and counts the insurance years he would hold by seventy. Each bar is one arrival age, and a taller bar means a bigger seniority increment on his pension. The flat black line low down is the five-year requirement. The red marks along the bottom are the ages at which he is never insured. Notice that no blue bar comes near failing the black line.

So the bar was never the problem. At sixty-two the insurance never begins, and our husband, landing at sixty-five, is on the far side of it.

How many Americans land on the wrong side of it?

Nefesh B'Nefesh reported 548 retirees among the 4,150 North Americans it brought in 2025, without publishing what a retiree is. There is a better source. The Ministry of Aliyah and Integration publishes its arrivals one row per immigrant, 384,688 of them from 2015 through 2025, each carrying age on arrival, sex and country of origin. Applying the sex-specific cutoff person by person: in 2025, 3,733 arrived from the United States and 534 arrived past the age at which Israel would insure them. Across eleven years, 5,096 out of 36,459, one arrival in seven.

Each bar below is a single year of age, and its height is how many Americans arrived at that age. The bars turn red at sixty-two, where a man stops being insured. Watch what the height does as you cross into the red.

American aliyah has two populations, split by a trough in the late forties. The older one runs about three times higher than that trough and sits past the boundary rather than before it: 654 arrived at sixty through sixty-four, and 2,511 between sixty-five and ninety.

The next chart stacks each year's American arrivals into one column. The grey part is everyone who arrived insured. The dark red band on top is everyone who arrived past the cutoff, with its count printed above the column.

Nothing in that curve bends at sixty-two. Sixty-five is over-determined by Medicare and by American full retirement age, so the peak proves little on its own. Still, if the Israeli rule were widely understood you would expect some bunching in the months before it, and there is none.

Why is there no agreement to fix this?

The Social Security Administration publishes the list of countries it has an agreement with, and there are thirty. Each block below is one country, stamped with the year its agreement came into force. Israel is drawn on its own, below the rule and in a dashed outline, because it has never been on that list.

Counting countries understates it, because countries are not the same size. The Social Security Administration also publishes how many people draw a United States benefit in each one, and in December 2025 there were 17,411 in Israel. The chart below ranks the eleven largest country destinations. Each bar is one country and its length is how many Americans collect there. Grey means an agreement exists. Red means it does not.

There is one exchange on the record, and it points at Israel rather than Washington. In June 2024 a Knesset committee took up a bill on double social insurance payments, and its chairman asked why the same kind of convention could not be made with the Americans. MK Simcha Rothman answered, prefacing it as his own understanding rather than a government position: given the number of Israelis in America and Americans in Israel, the consequences are uncertain and, in his words, not economically worthwhile. Misjudging the headcount could leave Bituach Leumi owing ten billion shekels.

That is the whole of the public record. One member's estimate of the exposure, no published analysis behind it, and nobody in the room disagreeing.

Israel did act on the working-age half of the problem. Amendment 262, sponsored by the same Rothman, passed on 25 February 2026 and exempts olim liable for American Social Security tax from Israeli national insurance for five years while preserving their entitlement. It does nothing for retirement, because a man arriving at sixty-five was never going to pay five years of contributions.

So what does the residual actually pay?

The special old-age benefit (gimlat ezrach vatik meyuchedet, גמלת אזרח ותיק מיוחדת) comes from the Ministry of Finance rather than the insurance fund, which is what makes it available to someone who never paid in. Its headline amount is not smaller: it equals the basic pension, 1,838 shekels a month. The differences are elsewhere.

Take the husband from the opening. The chart below runs him in at every age from thirty to seventy and shows what he lives on each month at seventy. The blue block at the foot of every column is his American Social Security, 4,859 shekels, the average actually paid to American retired workers in Israel. It is the same height everywhere, because moving does not change what America owes him. The brown block on top is the Israeli pension. Where it turns into a red dashed box, we do not know its height.

Article 21 of the 1975 treaty, carved out of the savings clause at Article 6(3), keeps that blue block beyond both tax authorities. The brown block falls from 2,757 shekels for a man who arrived young to 2,169 at sixty-one, which is the seniority increment shrinking. Then it stops being a block at all.

Why is the top of that bar a dashed line?

Because the special benefit is means tested permanently, and no page on either side of Bituach Leumi's website says whether an American Social Security check counts as income for that test.

The asymmetry is documented even though the answer is not. For the ordinary pension, the institute's income-test page lists income that is not taken into account, and the first item is a pension paid from Israel or abroad. That test also stops at seventy. The special benefit page says the opposite on both counts: it is tested even after the age of entitlement, and it caps non-work income at 4,418 shekels a month for a single person aged seventy to seventy-nine. No exclusion for foreign pensions appears on it.

The average American retired worker in Israel receives about 4,859 shekels a month from Social Security. The ceiling is 4,418.

That is a gap of 441 shekels, about a tenth over the line, measured with a figure that understates the case. The 4,859 average pools in people who emigrated young with short American records. A full career followed by a move, which is our couple exactly, sits further above the ceiling.

One place answers without saying so. Claim form BL/4501 asks the applicant to declare pension from abroad (pensia mechul, פנסיה מחו"ל) and annuity from abroad (renta mechul, רנטה מחו"ל), each with a box for the gross monthly amount. A form that asks for a number expects to use it.

And the parents who arrive at eighty?

Go back to the age chart and look how far right it runs. In the pooled five years, 388 Americans arrived between eighty and ninety and another 73 arrived older. These are parents brought over by children who already made aliyah, and their question is care rather than pension. Say our couple brings her mother over at eighty-four.

The structure treats the mother better than it treats her daughter. Long-term care (gimlat siud, גמלת סיעוד) turns on residency and reaching retirement age rather than on contribution history, so a person barred from the pension is not barred from care. Medicare covers nothing in Israel: keeping Part B costs 202.90 dollars a month for coverage unusable where she now lives.