Widowhood entails not only profound grief, but also severe economic consequences. The challenges surrounding widowhood are becoming increasingly urgent, and many pension systems require more sustainable solutions. Nevertheless, research is limited and fragmented in this regard. We assessed (1) the economic consequences of widowhood for households across European countries and (2) the role of survivor benefit transfers in mitigating the economic consequences of widowhood. We drew on data from the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe and applied multilevel between-within random effects regression modelling to address our research questions. We found that surviving spouses’ economic wellbeing declined in the years of spousal death in all European countries, and continued to decline one to two years after bereavement in nearly half of the countries in our sample. However, the impact of spousal death on widowed households’ economic wellbeing varied largely across countries. Our empirical analyses suggest that some country variation in the consequences of widowhood on surviving spouses’ economic wellbeing was due to crossnational differences in the coverage and especially the generosity of survivor benefits. We found that the decline in widowed households’ economic wellbeing was smaller in countries where survivor benefits were more generous. We conclude that public survivor benefits remain an important pillar to secure retired widows’ and widowers’ economic wellbeing during retirement.