Passive labour market policies brought the professional deactivation of a large group of older workers — in Poland at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. It contributed to perpetuating the problems and negative tendencies related to the low economic activity of older people and a significant burden on labour offices with services to people out of work, but not interested in taking it up. In this article, we assess the system of preretirement benefits implemented in Poland in the second half of the 1990s in the indicated dimensions. We supplement the analysis of legislative conditions with individual administrative data from the CeSAR data warehouse. This allows to point out the scale of the problem and the possible consequences of professional inactivity.