We examine how the change in the trend of the elderly’s employment rates has been associated with changes in incentives of social security and its related programs in Japan since the 1980s. We compute the tax force to retire early, using the institutional parameters and synthetic earnings profiles, and juxtapose the tax force measures and the elderly employment rates during 1980 and 2016. Our results suggest that a reduction in the tax force to retire early due to a series of social security reforms has been associated with the recent recovery of the employment rates for men aged 60 years and over as well as the increasing upward trend in the employment rates for women aged 55-64 years.