This article is an attempt to assess to what extent silver economy may become a development driver of rural areas. In the first part of the paper, attention focused on the scale of population ageing in rural areas and assumptions of silver economy. Hereinafter in the article, selected national strategic documents and programmes are presented and assessed in terms of their usefulness for the implementation of the silver economy concept in rural areas. Thus, the aim of the paper is to present and assess the place of various areas of silver economy activity in the development policy of Polish rural areas to which the descriptive statistics method was applied. The analysis performed shows that currently in Poland progress has been achieved in operationalisation of activities in the area of silver economy at quite a general level -programmes addressed to seniors as the overall community are created. On the other hand, roadmaps are missing for the implementation of senior policy for specific segments of elderly populations inhabiting rural areas where unfavourable demographic situation is particularly visible and where the society ageing process proceeds at a much slower space than across the country.