The State pension

Claim your State pension

If you’re entitled to a State pension, it’s paid to you when you reach your State pension age. However, it’s not paid to you automatically – you’ll need to claim it. You should receive a letter around two months before you reach State pension age, telling you what to do.

Your entitlement depends on how many qualifying years of National Insurance (NI) contributions you have. A new system was introduced in 2016, which means to receive any State pension at all, you must have at least 10 qualifying years. To get the full State pension, you must have 35 qualifying years. If you have between 10 and 35 qualifying years, you’ll get a proportionate amount of State pension (and your starting amount may also be different if you were ever previously in a contracted-out pension scheme).

You can use the government website to check your State pension age and get a State pension forecast.

Defer your State pension

You may not know that you can delay taking your State pension in order to increase your payments when you do start to claim it. Putting off the age you claim your State pension means the amount you’ll get when you do claim can go up significantly.

You can also defer your State pension payments after you start receiving it. You can only do this once during your retirement. Contact the Pension Service for more details on 0800 731 0469.