Health and Retirement Study (HRS)
The Health and Retirement Study (HRS) is a biennial longitudinal survey of U.S. households over age 50, run by the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research with sponsorship from the National Institute on Aging and the Social Security Administration. It follows the same respondents and their spouses over time on health, cognition, employment and retirement, income and wealth, pensions and Social Security, and expectations (including subjective probabilities about inflation, recessions, and stock returns). It is used in, for example, Ke, where the macroeconomic expectations of both spouses and household portfolio outcomes (stock market participation and equity share) come from the HRS panel.
- Cost: free for research; registration and a data-use agreement required.
- Access: free account at the Michigan HRS data portal, then bulk download.
- Coverage: U.S. households age 50 and over, biennial since 1992, with refresher cohorts added over time; individual and couple-level records.
- Home: https://hrs.isr.umich.edu · Data portal: https://hrsdata.isr.umich.edu
For a household wealth survey with no registration step, see the SCF, which the same retirement-and-wealth work often pairs with the HRS.
Access
Section titled “Access”- Register, then download. Create a free account at the HRS data portal, accept the data-use agreement, and download the data products in bulk. The raw HRS files are released wave by wave.
- RAND HRS Longitudinal File. Most analysts use the RAND HRS Longitudinal File rather than the raw wave files: it is a cleaned, harmonized, cross-wave extract with consistent variable names and derived measures, which removes most of the wave-to-wave reconciliation work.
- Not exercised here. The portal returned a 403 to automated requests from this session, so confirm the current download path in a browser. Access is gated by the account and agreement, not by payment.
Gotchas (the ones that bite pipelines)
Section titled “Gotchas (the ones that bite pipelines)”These are the failure modes to expect; the download itself was not run here.
- Registration and a data-use agreement gate every download. There is no anonymous bulk endpoint; an automated pull needs an authenticated session under the agreement, so a pipeline cannot fetch it keyless the way it fetches SCF or FRED.
- RAND HRS and raw HRS are different products. The RAND file harmonizes and renames variables across waves; the raw wave files do not. Mixing the two in one script breaks on variable names and codings. Pick one.
- It is biennial and respondent-linked. Waves are roughly two years apart, and individuals are linked to spouses and across waves by household and person identifiers. Couple-level analysis requires joining both spouses’ records within a wave; getting the link keys wrong silently drops or duplicates couples.
- Complex survey design. Estimates require the supplied person- and household-level weights (and the sampling design for standard errors). An unweighted mean is biased toward the sample design.
- An aging panel attrits, partly through mortality. Respondents leave the panel as they die or drop out, and refresher cohorts enter, so the composition shifts over time. Account for attrition and entry when building a balanced panel.
- Detailed pension and Social Security modules are separate. Rollover and pension-disposition events need the detailed-pension supplements, not the core panel; do not assume the headline file carries them.
Citation
Section titled “Citation”Cite the Health and Retirement Study (University of Michigan, sponsored by the National Institute on Aging and the Social Security Administration), the specific product and waves used (for example the RAND HRS Longitudinal File and its version), the variables and sample, and the access date. Follow the data-use agreement’s required acknowledgment language.