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A 2026 study of 5,679 adults born in northern Finland found that people classified as evening types had about 1.7 times the hazard of receiving a first disability pension as morning types over 12 years. That is a relative comparison—not a 70-percentage-point increase in an individual’s chance of receiving a pension, and not proof that being a night owl causes disability.
What the study found
Tapio Räihä and colleagues followed 5,679 non-retired participants in the Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1966. The study, published online ahead of print on September 30, 2026, measured chronotype when participants were 46, in 2012, and used register data to identify first disability-pension awards from 2012 through 2023, when participants were up to 57. The researchers used Cox regression to compare the hazard of an award over time. Read the study abstract on PubMed.
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Compared with morning types, evening types had an unadjusted hazard ratio of 1.72 for men (95% confidence interval 1.04–2.83) and 1.73 for women (95% confidence interval 1.22–2.46). In everyday language, those estimates are roughly 70% higher relative hazard for each sex. The confidence intervals indicate uncertainty around the estimates; they are not a range of individual outcomes.
During follow-up, 135 men (5.2% of men in the cohort) and 249 women (8.1% of women in the cohort) received a first disability pension. Among evening types specifically, the corresponding proportions were 8.3% of men and 12.1% of women. Those are absolute proportions for the evening-type groups; they do not by themselves show the morning-type proportions or the size of the relative difference.
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What “70% more likely” means—and does not mean
The headline shorthand can be misleading if read as a personal probability. A hazard ratio compares the rate at which an outcome occurs over a period of follow-up between groups. A hazard ratio near 1.7 does not mean that 70 out of every 100 night owls will receive a pension, nor that each person’s probability rises by 70 percentage points. The study abstract does not provide enough information to calculate an individual’s absolute risk from the relative estimates.
The reported estimates are unadjusted. The authors state that adjustment for socioeconomic factors did not attenuate the results, but the abstract does not give the fully adjusted hazard ratios. The distinction matters: the published summary supports the direction and approximate size of the association, but not a precise adjusted figure to quote.
Who was studied, and how chronotype was assessed
The participants were part of a Finnish birth cohort: people born in 1966 in northern Finland. At age 46, they completed a short Morningness–Eveningness Questionnaire, which categorized their chronotype. Evening types made up 9.7% of men and 12.4% of women in the study. The paper also reports that polygenic scores for morningness, available at age 31 for a subset of 5,130 participants, correlated with the survey assessment. That supports the measure’s validity; it does not show that chronotype caused pension awards.
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These findings describe an association in this cohort, not a universal estimate for every country, generation, or person who prefers late hours. Disability-pension systems and eligibility rules vary, and the study does not establish how the result would translate to other populations.
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Does being a night owl cause disability?
No causal conclusion follows from this observational study. It tracked chronotype and later pension awards, but it did not assign people to be morning or evening types, and an association cannot rule out other explanations or establish a biological pathway. The study does not show that changing sleep schedules, using a product, or adopting a particular routine would prevent a disability pension.
University of Oulu’s summary quoted researcher Tapio Räihä suggesting that poorer health among evening types may be related to lifestyle factors such as smoking and low physical activity, as well as disruption of the body’s internal clock and sleep problems. That is a proposed explanation, not a causal finding demonstrated by the cohort. The paper’s abstract calls for further research and action to support health and work ability among evening types.
How this differs from earlier research in the cohort
A separate 2021 analysis of the same birth cohort examined poor work ability at age 46 and disability pensions over a shorter 2013–2016 period. It is not the source of the 2026 study’s approximately 70% estimate, which comes from a 12-year register follow-up.
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