The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) is a Research Infrastructure for studying the effects of health, social, economic and environmental policies over the life-course of European citizens and beyond. From 2004 until today, 480,000 in-depth interviews with 140,000 people aged 50 or older from 28 European countries and Israel have been conducted. Thus, SHARE is the largest pan-European social science panel study providing internationally comparable longitudinal micro data which allows insights in the fields of public health and socio-economic living conditions of European individuals, both for scientists and policy makers. SHARE has global impact since it additionally is embedded in a network of sister studies all over the world, from the Americas to Eastern Asia.

SHARE was selected in the ESFRI Roadmap 2006 and given a new legal status as the first ever European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) in 2011. SHARE is centrally coordinated at the Munich Center for the Economics of Aging (MEA), a division of the Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy. To date, SHARE has collected eight panel Waves of current living circumstances and two waves of retrospective life histories. In March 2020, the outbreak of COVID-19 hit SHARE in the middle of its 8th Wave of data collection and the fieldwork had to be suspended. A first release of SHARE’s new Wave 8 COVID-19 data has been published in December 2020. In 2021, regular SHARE Wave 8 data is published and a second SHARE Corona Survey is implemented in all SHARE member countries.