The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) is a multidisciplinary and cross-national panel database of micro data on health, socio-economic status and social and family networks of more than 55,000 individuals from 20 European countries aged 50 or over.

The data are available to the entire research community free of charge. For a summary overview of SHARE, you can download the SHARE brochure.

SHARE responds to a Communication by the European Commission calling to "examine the possibility of establishing, in co-operation with Member States, a European Longitudinal Ageing Survey". SHARE has become a major pillar of the European Research Area, selected as one of the projects to be implemented in the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) in 2008 and given a new legal status as the first ever European Research Infrastructure Consortium (SHARE-ERIC) in March 2011.

SHARE is centrally coordinated by Axel Börsch-Supan, Ph.D. at the Munich Center for the Economics of Aging (MEA), Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy. It is harmonized with the U.S. Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) and has become a role model for several ageing surveys worldwide. SHARE’s scientific power is based on its panel design that grasps the dynamic character of the ageing process. SHARE’s multi-disciplinary approach delivers the full picture of the ageing process. Rigorous procedural guidelines and programs ensure an ex-ante harmonized cross-national design.