The purpose of this paper is to investigate the retirement decision in the United Kingdom. We distinguish four retirement routes: retirement, unemployment, long-term sickness and other states. The focus of the paper is the impact of pension benefits on retirement transitions. We estimate multinomial logits and Cox proportional hazard rate models, separately for men and women. We conclude that participation in an occupational pension scheme increases the retirement hazard rate for men. The results for women are less clear-cut given the relatively small number of women entitled to an occupational pension scheme ...