How do you qualify for the State Pension - and what kind of retirement will it provide?

We asked a cross section of the public about their attitudes to saving for retirement and a strong theme became apparent very quickly.* There is a lot of confusion about how you qualify for the State Pension and the kind of retirement it will provide. One in seven didn’t understand how you qualify for the State Pension at all.

However, most people understood that the State Pension is linked to your National Insurance (NI) record. As well as paying contributions from your salary, you also earn NI credits from the age of 16 if you are in full time education and when claiming certain working-age benefit such as Carers’ Allowance, Job Seekers’ Allowance and Universal Credit.

You don’t start paying NI until you more than £242 a week or £12,570 a year, and if your earnings as an employee are less than ££123 a week from one job, or you are a self-employed person making a profit of less than ££6,725 you do not acquire credits towards the State Pension. You can find out more at this government website.

On average, those we surveyed thought you needed 24 years’ contributions and/or credits to qualify for a full State Pension.

• 11% believed there was no minimum.
• 45% of those aged between 35 and 55 think you need 20 years’ contributions or less.
• 60% of millennials (27-42 year olds) think you can retire on a full State Pension in less than 25 years.
• Those aged between 18 and 26 believe you can claim the full State Pension in 16 years on average.

How many qualifying years do you need for the full New State Pension?

Only one in six (16%) of those surveyed got the answer right: you need at least 35 qualifying years of NI contributions to get the New State Pension in full. Here are a few examples of how this could apply to you:

• If your National Insurance Records start after 6 April 2016 (which is when the New State Pension was introduced), you will need 35 qualifying years to receive the maximum allowance
  

• However, if your NI records start before then, you’ll still need at least 35 years of qualifying contributions or credits to get the full amount, but you may need additional years to reach it if you were contracted out of the Additional State Pension (also known as being “contracted out of SERPS”)
• If you have between 10 and 35 years of qualifying contributions or credits, you get a proportion of the State Pension.

What counts as a qualifying year for the State Pension?

A qualifying year is any tax year in which you paid sufficient National Insurance contributions, or you are otherwise treated as them having been paid to protect your National Insurance record. This is mainly through your workplace earnings but only if you earn more that £123 a week . If you are self employed and have been paying Class 2 NI contributions, these also count as qualifying years.

But you also get credits for periods when you are not in full-time employment. You get these if you were claiming certain working age credits. These include:

• Jobseeker’s Allowance

• Employment and Support Allowance
• Working Tax Credit
• Child Benefit for children under 12.
• Statutory Sick Pay.

How much do you get from the New State Pension and what sort of retirement does it provide?

If you qualify for the full New State Pension, you will get £11,502 a year from 6th April 2024. Six out of seven people in our survey (86%) said they expect to be fully or partly reliant on their state pension.

It’s interesting to compare this to research from the University of Loughborough which revealed a very basic retirement lifestyle in 2024 will cost around £14,400 for a person living on their own or £22,400 for a couple. A moderate retirement will cost £23,300 for a single person or £34,000 for a couple. A comfortable retirement will cost a single person £43,100 and a couple £59,000.

For someone living on their own these represent increases of 12.5%, 34.3% and 15.6% on 2023. For a couple these are increases of 12.6%, 26.8%, and 8.3%. All of these are significantly higher than the “official” inflation rate published by the Office for National Statistics. At the end of December 2023 this was 4.9%. These figures show how we all need to be aware of our personal spending habits and our personal inflation rate.

So even if you qualify for the full New State Pension, you could struggle to achieve a basic retirement with that alone, although you could manage better as a retired couple who both qualified. Taking one of the examples above, if you only had 20 years’ NI contributions, you could expect to receive a state pension of just over £6,572 which wouldn’t provide much of a lifestyle at all.

How can you get more State Pension?

If you’re looking to increase the amount you’ll get from your state pension, you have could make voluntary contributions to boost any gaps in your records from the the previous six tax years.

If you’d like to get an idea of how much extra to contribute to your personal pensions over the years, calculators can be incredibly useful:

• Find out approximately how much you’ll need to save for retirement with our Pension Contributor Calculator
• Or explore our Pension Drawdown Calculator and discover out how to spend your retirement pot over the years in a sustainable way

How do I check my National Insurance record?

When asked, less than half of all consumers and almost six in ten millennials have never checked their National Insurance records or don’t understand the link between National Insurance payments and the State Pension.

You can correct this by visiting the government website and visiting their ‘Check NI records’ page.

What else can you do to improve your retirement income?

Save! We will all have to take more responsibility for our own retirements and the best way to do that is to make sure we have enough money set aside to fund us through our third age. Indeed, 65% of those we spoke to are worried about being able to afford retirement, and 20% of retirees had carried on working or taken on a new job or ‘side hustle’ to pay their day-to-day bills.

There are four options available: pensions (such as a SIPP), individual savings accounts (ISAs), lifetime ISAs (LISAs), and general investment accounts (GIAs). Pensions, ISAs and LISAs all provide the potential for tax-free growth, and this can be an important boost to long-term returns.

But by far the most tax efficient way to prepare for retirement is via pensions savings. Payments into your savings are generally tax free and all income and growth received within the account are also free of taxes. In the tax year 2024/25 most investors can contribute up to 100% of their income or £60,000 (whichever is the lower) and get tax relief of up to 45%.

Even if you’re not a taxpayer you can still contribute £2,880 into a pension and receive tax relief of £720 making a total contribution of £3,600. The younger you are the more chance you have of building the savings needed to fund your leisure years. Even saving small amounts at the start of your journey can build into a reasonable pot with the power of compound returns – the potential to earn growth on top of growth.

However, you cannot access the money in your pension pot until you turn 55, rising to 57 in 2028 and potentially higher in line with increases in the State Pension age. If you think you might need to access your wealth before then, an ISA gives you more freedom, although funding an ISA will probably be from taxed wealth so they don’t have as many tax benefits.

Where can you find help with your retirement plans?

There are free resources such as the government’s Money Helper website. But if you want something tailored to your situation, the Charles Stanley One Step Retirement Savings Plan offers a tailored financial plan using our expertise.

Each of our One Step Financial Plans provides guidance and streamlined advice around a commonly asked financial question for people with non-complex needs.

The Retirement Savings Plan can help you:

• Figure out when you want to stop working and how much money you’ll need to support the lifestyle you want.
• Create a savings and investment plan that makes the most of your tax-free allowances.
• Take control of different pensions as well as any other savings and investments you may already have.
• Make sure any existing plan is on track, and help you think about the best ways to close any funding gap should one arise.

Looking for more support with your pension saving? Check out our range of tools and services to help you prepare for retirement.