Daily Lives of Older Adults: Design and First Findings from the Share Wave 8 Time Expenditure Module

Studying how people manage and use their time not only deepens our understanding of individual routines but also highlights the roles they play within their household and society. The Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) Wave 8 developed a novel time expenditure module enabling cross-national, longitudinal analysis of daily activities among adults aged 50 and over. This paper presents the module’s design and initial findings. We provide methodological guidance essential for accurate data interpretation and present descriptive results by country, gender, age, and education. Our findings reveal substantial cross-national variation in time allocation patterns. While sleep (7-8.5 hours) and leisure activities (3.5-5.5 hours) dominate daily schedules across all countries, women spend approximately an hour more per day on household chores than men, with even greater gaps of 78 to 109 minutes in Southern Europe. Gender differences in care work are negligible, with the notable exception of Israel where women provide substantially more care. In contrast, men spend more time in paid work and leisure. Educational gradients are most pronounced for paid work: tertiary-educated older adults spend nearly three times as long in employment (119 minutes) compared to those with below-secondary education (44 minutes). Time use shifts substantially with age: paid work drops from 207 to 18 minutes between ages 50-64 and 65-79, while leisure and sleep increase. Contrary to stereotypes of older adults’ lives, these patterns reveal both continuity and change. With subsequent waves, this module will illuminate whether these patterns represent stable features of later life or transitional states that evolve with health, partnership status, and proximity to end of life.