Consider Michael Gartland, who applied to more than 120 jobs over nine months in 2024. A 58-year-old project manager in Ohio with decades of experience, he kept hitting the same wall: a promising phone screen, an in-person interview, then nothing. The pattern is common enough that researchers and employment attorneys recognize it on sight: applications that move forward when age is not visible, then stall once a hiring manager meets the candidate face-to-face.

Gartland’s story is one person’s account, but federal enforcement data now covering fiscal year 2024, combined with peer-reviewed research and active litigation, paints a picture that is hard to dismiss: age discrimination in hiring remains deeply embedded in the American labor market, and by several measures, it is getting worse.

What federal data shows about ADEA hiring charges over time

In fiscal year 2024, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission received 16,223 charges alleging age discrimination under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, an increase from 14,141 charges in FY 2023, and a year-over-year rise of about 15 percent, according to the agency’s enforcement and litigation statistics. The EEOC’s public tables track every ADEA charge filed from FY 1997 through FY 2024, broken down by issue type: hiring, discharge, promotion, harassment, and more.

That 27-year span reveals a stubborn pattern. Age-related hiring charges have not declined in proportion to the growing number of older Americans in the workforce. They persist through tight labor markets and loose ones, through recessions and recoveries. Compared with complaints filed under other statutes covering race, sex, and disability, ADEA hiring charges have remained a consistent share of the agency’s intake.

On the litigation side, the EEOC’s Office of General Counsel FY 2024 annual report confirms the agency filed merits lawsuits that included ADEA claims during the fiscal year, with hiring among the specific issues raised. The report also identifies systemic investigations targeting patterns or practices affecting groups of older workers as an ongoing enforcement priority, language that signals the commission views age bias in hiring as a structural problem rather than a series of isolated disputes.

There is an important caveat: the report does not break out the exact number of ADEA hiring suits filed or specify case outcomes, which limits how much can be drawn from the litigation data alone.

A field experiment reveals where bias actually happens

Federal charge data can show how many people file complaints. It cannot reveal the precise moment discrimination occurs. A National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by economist David Neumark tackled that question directly. Neumark’s study, “Age Discrimination in Hiring: Evidence from Age-Blind vs. Non-Age-Blind Hiring Procedures” (NBER Working Paper 26623, forthcoming in the Journal of Human Resources), analyzed data from a real hiring process where applicants moved through two stages.

In the first stage, employers reviewed applications without age-revealing details. In the second stage, candidates sat for in-person interviews. Under the non-age-blind procedure, older applicants (40 and over) received job offers at rates 68 percent lower than younger applicants with comparable qualifications. The finding points to age discrimination that operates at the interview stage rather than during resume screening, with real policy implications: interventions like resume audits and algorithmic screening reviews would not catch prejudice that activates only when an employer sees a candidate in person.

A lawsuit against RTX shows how job postings can filter out older workers

While Neumark’s study examined bias at the interview stage, a federal class action lawsuit filed against RTX, the defense and aerospace parent company of Raytheon, alleges that discrimination can begin even earlier, in the job posting itself. In Goldstein v. RTX Corp., filed in June 2024 in federal court in Boston, lead plaintiff Mark Goldstein, 67, alleges that RTX structured job listings around terms like “recent college graduate,” “new graduate,” and similar phrases and required less than 12 or 24 months of work experience for positions requiring a college or graduate degree, criteria that functioned as proxies for youth and effectively filtered out experienced applicants without naming age directly.

The suit, brought under the ADEA along with Massachusetts and Virginia state employment laws, follows a 2021 EEOC reasonable-cause determination that found Raytheon’s job advertisements violated the ADEA. Goldstein had filed an EEOC charge against the company in 2019. Despite the 2021 finding, the lawsuit alleges RTX continued to post jobs that discriminated against and deterred older workers from applying. Plaintiffs’ counsel includes the AARP Foundation Litigation, Peter Romer-Friedman Law, and Outten & Golden LLP.RTX has denied the allegations, saying it “complies with all relevant age discrimination laws” and intending to “actively defend” its hiring practices. As of mid-2026, the case remains active.

Patricia Barnes, an employment attorney and author of Betrayed: The Legalization of Age Discrimination in the Workplace, argues that limiting job postings to “recent grads” functions as an illegal proxy for age discrimination. It subtly enforces a “no one over 30 need apply” rule.

Employment attorneys say the pattern extends well beyond one company. Phrases like “digital native,” “high-energy culture,” and “zero to five years of experience” can discourage older applicants from applying at all, even when the language does not explicitly violate the statute. Those chilled applications never become EEOC charges, which means the federal data, as comprehensive as it is, likely understates the true scope of the problem.

The gaps in what we know

For all its value, the available evidence has real limits. The EEOC’s published statistics track how many charges are filed and provide some resolution data, but detailed outcome breakdowns for FY 2024 ADEA hiring charges, including how many ended in settlements, cause findings, or dismissals, have not been fully released as of May 2026. A high volume of filings could reflect either a surge in meritorious claims or a rise in complaints the agency ultimately does not pursue. Without resolution data, it is impossible to say which.

The NBER experiment, while carefully designed, examined a specific set of employers and hiring contexts. Whether its results hold across industries with very different labor dynamics, such as construction versus software engineering, has not been tested. The study also did not examine how age intersects with race or gender. That gap matters. Older Black women or older Latino men may face compounding disadvantages that a single-axis analysis misses entirely.

The broadest limitation is structural. Workers who never apply because a posting signals it is not meant for them leave no trace in charge data or hiring experiments. Corporate branding that leans heavily on youth culture, office photos featuring only twenty-somethings, or social media recruiting aimed at recent graduates can suppress applications from qualified older candidates long before a hiring manager makes a decision. That invisible layer of discouragement is the hardest to measure and the easiest to deny.

Why the law leaves older job seekers at a disadvantage

ADEA has been federal law since 1967, but its enforcement architecture was built for a different labor market. The statute covers workers 40 and older and prohibits age-based discrimination in hiring, promotion, compensation, and termination. In practice, hiring cases are among the hardest to prove. Unlike a fired employee who can point to a specific adverse action and a documented work record, a rejected applicant often has little visibility into who was hired instead or why.

The Supreme Court’s 2009 decision in Gross v. FBL Financial Services raised the bar further. The Court held that ADEA plaintiffs must prove age was the “but-for” cause of an adverse action, a stricter standard than the mixed-motive framework available under Title VII for race and sex claims. In practical terms, an older job seeker must show that age was not just a factor in the decision but the decisive one.

Legal advocates argue the burden of proof has had real-world consequences for older job seekers. Laurie McCann, a senior attorney at AARP Foundation Litigation, has testified before the House Education and Labor Committee that the Gross decision has resulted in significant harm to older workers challenging age discrimination, requiring them to prove not just that age discrimination was a motivating factor in their treatment but that it was the decisive, “but-for” cause of an employer’s conduct.

Legislative proposals to restore a mixed-motive standard for age claims have been introduced in multiple sessions of Congress, most recently through versions of the Protecting Older Workers Against Discrimination Act, including S. 1690 and H.R. 3289 in the 118th Congress. None have advanced to a floor vote in either chamber, despite bipartisan support in some sessions.

Where this leaves workers over 40

Until the legal standard shifts, older workers alleging hiring discrimination will continue to face a higher evidentiary burden than plaintiffs bringing comparable race or sex claims. The EEOC’s own data suggests that gap is not closing on its own. Meanwhile, the labor force is aging. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2024-2034 Employment Projections, released in September 2025, project that workers ages 55 and older will continue to make up a substantial share of the U.S. workforce through 2034, even as overall labor force participation declines slightly over the decade. The demographic shift means more older Americans facing hiring barriers, not fewer.

Some states have moved to fill the gap. New York’s Human Rights Law applies to employers with four or more employees and has been interpreted to allow mixed-motive age claims that federal law forecloses. California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act applies to employers with five or more employees and provides broader remedies than ADEA. Several other states, including New Jersey and Illinois, have similar provisions. Whether those state-level efforts translate into measurably better outcomes for older job seekers is a question researchers are only beginning to answer.

For older workers like Michael Gartland facing the patterns the data documents, the question is not whether age discrimination in hiring is real, as federal data, peer-reviewed research, and active litigation all confirm that it is. The question is what the legal system, employers, and the labor market will do about it. Until the evidentiary standard shifts or enforcement reaches the patterns at scale, the numbers suggest the answer will continue to fall short of what older job seekers are asking for: a chance to be evaluated on what they can do, not on what year they were born.