qualifying years for state pension.

p00hsticks

molerat wrote: »

I am not quite sure what you are worried about. You will need at least 10 years NI contributions to qualify for the new pension and those with less than 35 will have a reduced pension.

It may be that Joe Crystal has mis-read the BBC website reporting of this linked to earlier on this thread, as I did originally (I think it could have been worded better).
It says that .....

"The government is also expected to announce that anyone who has not paid National Insurance (NI) for at least 10 years will not qualify for the enhanced state pension."

On my first reading of that I took it to mean that if you haven't made any NI contributions within the last ten years ,then you wouldn't be entitled to a state pension. However, as you say, this isn't what it means at all - it means that you need to have made at least ten years NI contributions over your working life to qualify for any state pension at all.

This is the same as it was until a couple of years back (when it was reduced from ten to one years).

(From statements made on BBC Breakfast this morning, the thinking behind this is mainly to avoid having to pay small pension amounts to people living in other countries who have got one or two years contributions in this country from things like bar work whilst on gap years etc... )

Stompa

In recent years I've used the online service to annually get a state pension forecast. Each of these shows the number of 'qualifying years'. However, once my number of 'qualifying years' reached 30, it stopped increasing in subsequent forecasts. Does anybody know if this is because they only show the number of years that actually 'qualify' you for anything under the current system (so it doesn't report any excess years), or have I got a problem?

Thanks

jingleberry

Stompa wrote: »

In recent years I've used the online service to annually get a state pension forecast. Each of these shows the number of 'qualifying years'. However, once my number of 'qualifying years' reached 30, it stopped increasing in subsequent forecasts. Does anybody know if this is because they only show the number of years that actually 'qualify' you for anything under the current system (so it doesn't report any excess years), or have I got a problem?

Thanks

I had 35 qualifying years when I retired in 2008. I obtained a quote from the pension service in 2011 which told me I had 30 qualifying years. Given that we have both experienced the same issue I would think it is safe to assume that the number stops increasing once you reach 30. If the number of years required changes to 35, the number on the statement should increase.

jamesd

They track whether each year was a qualifying year, including retaining records of the income that year that qualified you. If you pick a quiet time you can even get them to tell you for each year whether it was a qualifying year and what the income level was.

I don't know whether the forecast stops at 30 even for those with more than 30 years but that makes sense.

Stompa

jingleberry wrote: »

I had 35 qualifying years when I retired in 2008. I obtained a quote from the pension service in 2011 which told me I had 30 qualifying years. Given that we have both experienced the same issue I would think it is safe to assume that the number stops increasing once you reach 30. If the number of years required changes to 35, the number on the statement should increase.

Thanks, good to know it's not just me. Personally I'd have thought it would have made more sense to show the actual number of years contributions, and simply state that only the first 30 were relevant, but what do I know!

molerat

My forecast only shows 30 years but I worked continuously from 16 1/4 to 55 with a brief period on JSA in 1994 so I should have 37 years in the bag. Will need to get a new forecast in April and check. The people who will seemingly be affected most are those that wish to retire early but spent a lot of years at uni, they should be on higher incomes and hopefully have made self provision for retirement. Mrs M has got 27 years after we bought some extra years whilst they were going cheap and 27/35 of £144 is still better than 27/30 of £107. Might be worth her becoming a self employed ebay seller (or sage as I have read on here), with little if any profit of course, and cough up the £2.70 per week class 2 contributions as a year is now worth £4.11 a week as against £3.56.

martin57

1 Currently at the moment I think I have just over 33 years qualifying (some of those are NI credits due to been on incapacity benefit) so I take it those will still count under the new system?

2 Am I right in thinking that you can get a fairly accurate breakdown of your pension by using the number of qualifying years such as 33/35 of whaterver the amount of the state pension is?

3 As regards buying the years to make up the 35 if a person is a few years short, just wonder how much it will cost and if there is a a timeframe what you have to do it within?

Thanks
Martin57

molerat

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/rates/nic.htm
http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/ni/volcontr/basics.htm

SnowMan

SnowMan wrote: »

BBC website are now confirming the 35 year requirement. Completely ridiculous to reduce it to 30 and then put it back up to 35

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20989050

Steve Webb seems to have just said in his statement that existing rights to state pension will be protected so somebody with 30 years currently who accrues no further entitlement will get at least the current (full) basic state pension plus any accrued state second pension.

The 35 years applies in its rawest form to new starters in the system now (16 year olds), who don't benefit from that protection, and reflects that the basic state pension accrues over 30 years and the additional state pension over close to 50 years. So 35 is a sort of weighted mix of the two. That sounds reasonable so I was perhaps wrong to say it was ridiculous.

Need to see the detail though in particular how past rights are protected.

JoeCrystal

p00hsticks wrote: »

It may be that Joe Crystal has mis-read the BBC website reporting of this linked to earlier on this thread, as I did originally (I think it could have been worded better).
It says that .....

"The government is also expected to announce that anyone who has not paid National Insurance (NI) for at least 10 years will not qualify for the enhanced state pension."

On my first reading of that I took it to mean that if you haven't made any NI contributions within the last ten years ,then you wouldn't be entitled to a state pension. However, as you say, this isn't what it means at all - it means that you need to have made at least ten years NI contributions over your working life to qualify for any state pension at all.

This is the same as it was until a couple of years back (when it was reduced from ten to one years).

(From statements made on BBC Breakfast this morning, the thinking behind this is mainly to avoid having to pay small pension amounts to people living in other countries who have got one or two years contributions in this country from things like bar work whilst on gap years etc... )

Oh that is good news then. It got me worried for a moment.

Cheers,
Joe