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In Europe, social counselling services increasingly follow the guiding principle active ageing. Active ageing policies help people recognise and use their physical, social and mental potential in order to participate in society according to their individual needs and capacities. Counselling the heterogeneous target group—‘older people’—implies that services should be prepared to address individual risks and resources. This article discusses the largely unclear position of social counselling for older people within social work in Europe. An empirical perspective is established with a German online survey, conducted among social counselling professionals nationwide (N= 1050). Their services were studied in terms of service provision, target groups, counsellor qualification and applied methods. The aim was to describe and classify the existing counselling provision. The study revealed that social counselling is located somewhere between advice and psychotherapy, and as such primarily focused on helping with age-related deficits and problems. A considerable proportion of client contacts results from acute crises. Still, only a third of the respondents followed a specific, defined concept in their work, and even fewer stated having gerontological qualification. Primary achievements of the study were to help classify existing social counselling services for older people and to develop basic gerontological training for counsellors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]