What is the average age of ICE agents at retirement?

1. Statutory retirement rules that set likely retirement windows

Federal law enforcement retirement rules create clear thresholds that shape when many ICE officers become eligible to retire: under FERS and 5 U.S.C. §8412(d) a law‑enforcement officer with at least 20 years of service can take law enforcement retirement at age 50, and an officer with 25 years of service may retire at any age under 6(c) coverage ^{[1] [2]}. Those rules also include mandatory retirement provisions—employees who reach age 57 with at least 20 years of service are subject to mandatory retirement under the cited retirement systems—which further bounds the outer end of a potential retirement‑age distribution ^[1].

2. What the official ICE pages actually report (and what they don’t)

ICE’s career FAQ and retiree guidance describe eligibility thresholds, administrative steps for annuities and Thrift Savings Plan withdrawals, and programs such as LEOSA qualifications for separated members, but they do not publish aggregated metrics like mean or median age at separation or at retirement for agents and deportation officers ^{[1] [3]}. The retiree page discusses transactional timelines and TSP rules at ages 65–70½ but not demographic retirement statistics ^[3].

3. How hiring policy changes affect possible retirement ages but not current averages

Recent policy moves to remove upper age caps for new ICE recruits expand the age range of entry cohorts—eliminating prior ceilings that were 37 or 40 for certain positions—so, over time, those changes could alter the future distribution of retirement ages by allowing older entrants to serve shorter tenures before retiring or to delay participation entirely ^{[4] [5]}. Those personnel changes are relevant context but cannot retroactively produce an actual current “average retirement age” without longitudinal workforce data ^{[4] [6]}.

4. Why an “average” is not determinable from the presented sources

An average retirement age requires individual-level exit dates or aggregated statistics (counts by age at separation) that are not included in ICE’s FAQ pages, retiree guidance, or the news reporting provided; the materials give eligibility rules and policy announcements but no empirical retirement distributions or OPM/ICE workforce tables from which a mean or median could be calculated ^{[1] [3] [2]}. Absent such data, any numeric “average” would be speculation rather than reporting.

5. Likely practical range and influencing factors (informed inference, not a computed average)

Given the eligibility structure, a pragmatic expectation is that many career law‑enforcement officers retire somewhere between the early 50s—if they meet 20 years of service by age 50—and the late 50s when mandatory retirement can apply at 57 with sufficient service; others who attain 25 years earlier could retire younger, while some stay past eligibility for personal or financial reasons ^{[1] [2]}. Factors that materially influence actual retirement timing—such as hiring cohorts, injuries, promotion patterns, carryover of military service, or changes in recruitment age caps—are discussed in the reporting but require workforce data to quantify their net effect on an average ^{[7] [8]}.

6. Where to look next for a defensible average and what to ask of the data

The precise average would need official personnel or retirement statistics—ICE’s human capital reports, Office of Personnel Management datasets, or a Freedom of Information Act request for ICE separations by age and retirement type—because the public pages and media coverage in the packet supply eligibility rules and policy changes but not the aggregate retirement outcomes necessary to compute an average ^{[1] [3] [6]}. Any request should ask for counts of retirements by single year of age and type (disability, law‑enforcement/6(c), voluntary, mandatory) to derive accurate mean and median values.