Why do I not get regular statements for my NI contributions?

greenglide

They are meant to write to you if, in any year, you haven't made sufficient contributions or haven't been credited with contributions.

Unless I am very much mistaken these letters were discontinued in the 90s. In these days of part time working, early retirement, low pay etc it would be difficult to know who to send them to anyway. Entitlement to the full State Pension is much easier that before, even with the requirement increasing to 35 years still leaves plenty of slack unlike in the past where any gap in contributions was potentially a serious matter.

JezR

I got one a missing contribution letter that would have been in the early 2000s. It arose because of a HMRC error in mislaying information from my employer and affected about a third of the people in the company. The system could not automatically detect that they had so many people with apparently missing contributions at the same company and just generated the individual letters.

DaveMcG

greenglide wrote: »

Unless I am very much mistaken these letters were discontinued in the 90s.

I certainly got a letter in 2008 or 2009, but that was with no contributions at all for the year. So can't say with certainty what they do with say earnings of £3000 over a couple of months and nothing else.

Chomeur

Seven weeks gone and no sign of this statement.

hugheskevi

You could use the service at https://www.tax.service.gov.uk/checkmystatepension

There is a rather arduous identity verification process, but once you wade through that you can get a breakdown of each year, and whether it was a qualifying year, contracted-out year, or whatever.

mgdavid

Chomeur wrote: »

So to get the State Pension I have to have paid National Insurance contributions for at least 30 years. Yet the government never sends me a statement of what contributions I have made. How's this supposed to work? .........

It's supposed to work by you taking responsibility to check your payslips every week/month. NI contributions are shown on there.

Chomeur

hugheskevi wrote: »

You could use the service at https://www.tax.service.gov.uk/checkmystatepension

There is a rather arduous identity verification process, but once you wade through that you can get a breakdown of each year, and whether it was a qualifying year, contracted-out year, or whatever.

Yes, that has worked, without too much hassle, thanks.

Chomeur

mgdavid wrote: »

It's supposed to work by you taking responsibility to check your payslips every week/month. NI contributions are shown on there.

Yes I suppose you should keep all your pay slips for your entire working life. Unfortunately I haven't. Also if you pay contributions by direct debit and you have paperless statements from your bank it's going to be hard to ensure you have good records of payments.

bigfreddiel

mgdavid wrote: »

It's supposed to work by you taking responsibility to check your payslips every week/month. NI contributions are shown on there.

Absolutely right, people expect everything to be done for them, but then when the gov does other things they don't like they moan on about it being a nanny state and they cam make decisions for themselves. Well you can't ha it both ways, but there you go.
Cheers fj

p00hsticks

If you are a UK taxpayer you should now be getting an annual summary by post from HMRC that shows the tax and NI you've paid - I think these were introduced last year

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/annual-tax-summary

What I can't recall off the top of my head is whether the NI information makes it clear if your contributions over the year are sufficient to count as a qualifying year for State Pension purposes.

EDIT: I've just reviewed all the previous posts in this thread - am I really the only poster who received one of these after the end of the last tax year and can remember getting it (although I can't recall exactly when in the year it arrived) ?