This study investigates the characteristics that contribute to elderly poverty, mainly focusing on individuals’ lifetime work experience. It adopts the heterogeneous relative poverty line. It calculates the work experience and obtains demographic variables using the Korean Labor and Income Panel Study’s survey data for 2006, 2009, 2012 and 2015. The objective is to estimate poverty among elderly and explain its variations in relation to individual characteristics and lifetime work experience. Poverty is measured in terms of the head count, poverty gap and the poverty severity indices based on monetary dimensions, namely income and consumption. The methodology used in this study is a logit model to explain the incidence of poverty and a sample selection model to analyze the depth and severity of poverty. The results show that an increase in the total work years and a decrease in the gap years between jobs reduce incidence and depth of poverty.