In order to receive the maximum state pension on retirement, you will need between 30 and 35 years full years of National Insurance contributions, depending on your date of birth.
You can check how many full years you have, and how many years you still need to get a full pension, by logging in to your Personal Tax Account (PTA). You can access your PTA through the HMRC website at this link: https://www.gov.uk/personal-tax-account. If you haven’t already registered for one you can do so through the same link.
You can also get a state pension forecast which will tell you how much you will get based on your current level of contributions, and how much you could get with more years added.
If you have missing years – maybe due to living outside the UK, or having a period of low earnings or self-employment income – then you can choose to fill these in by making voluntary national insurance contributions.
Ordinarily, you can only go back six tax years – so there would be a deadline of 5th April 2023 to make up gaps in contribution years from 2016/17 onwards.
However, there is a one-time opportunity at the moment to go back to the 2006/07 tax year and fill in up to 16 years of missing contributions. The deadline for this has been extended from 31 July 2023 and is now to 5 April 2025.
The deadline has been extended to help allay continued concerns that the existing deadline would not have allowed many taxpayers to fill gaps in their NIC records.
Of course, there is a cost for this: voluntary contributions – called Class 3 contributions – are payable at a rate of £15.85 per week, which is £824.20 for a full year. You would need to decide whether the additional state pension you could receive makes it worth making these additional contributions.
You can contact the Future Pension Centre – details on HMRC’s website at this link: https://www.gov.uk/future-pension-centre – for information about whether you could benefit from voluntary contributions.
If you any questions please do not hesitate to get in touch and I’ll be happy to speak with you.
