An individual’s retirement pension reflects their career path, insofar as it is the counterpart to contributions paid on the basis of wages earned. Rapid transformations in the sphere of work, in conjunction with legislative changes to the pension system, have resulted in substantial differences in the retirement conditions of generations born only a dozen years apart: those generations of 1944, 1950 and 1956. While the profiles of men having continuous careers and earning high wages become moderately less frequent, there is a sharp decrease in the profiles of women whose professional activities are discontinuous. Comparisons can be drawn between the pathways of these three generations in terms of retirement age, pension size, replacement rate relative to a policyholder’s ultimate wage and duration of the retirement period. Benefitting from early retirement before the age of 60 on account of long careers and unaffected by the increase in the age of entitlement, the generation of 1950 constitutes a low point in the mean retirement age. As a result, the latter generation has a longer mean retirement period. Conversely, the generation of 1956 can be distinguished by a shorter mean retirement period and lower mean pension than the generation of 1950. For all three generations, there are marked spreads between women and men. Whereas women have a longer retirement period, in line with their greater life expectancy, men retire at a younger age on average and have a more favourable overall pension and replacement rate.