Employment Trajectories and Biological Aging: Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Work Instability and Epigenetic Age Acceleration

Racial and ethnic inequalities in healthy aging may reflect the cumulative biological toll of structural disadvantage. Employment is one life-course pathway through which this disadvantage is reproduced, yet most research relies on point-in-time measures rather than long-term work histories. Guided by the weathering hypothesis, this study examined whether life-course employment trajectories were patterned by race and ethnicity, whether they were associated with epigenetic age acceleration (EAA), and whether racial and ethnic differences in EAA persisted within similar work histories. Using the 2016 Health and Retirement Study with the linked Life History Mail Survey and Venous Blood Study, we constructed employment histories from ages 18 to 50 and applied sequence and cluster analysis to identify four trajectories. Multinomial logistic regression showed that Black and Hispanic adults had more than twice the odds of “Late Workforce Entry” than White adults, with differences concentrated in delayed entry rather than mid-career disruption or non-employment. In survey-weighted OLS models across five epigenetic clocks (N = 1,864), employment trajectory was largely unrelated to EAA and did not moderate racial and ethnic differences in it. Racial differences nonetheless persisted within trajectories: Black adults showed faster DunedinPACE and GrimAge acceleration than White adults, including within stable full-time work and within long-term non-employment, while differing in the opposite direction on the age-predictive Hannum clock. These findings partially align with the weathering hypothesis, suggesting that racial differences in biological aging arise not primarily through sorting into unstable employment pathways, but through unequal conditions within seemingly similar employment trajectories, where the benefits of employment stability may not be equally realized across racial and ethnic groups.