Do you still work? Perhaps you’ve retired to Spain early and don’t yet collect your UK state pension or perhaps you’re close to retirement and want to know whether you’ve contributed enough to receive a full UK state pension when it’s time. These are all questions that most of us here on the Costa Blanca and further away may ask ourselves from time to time – I know I did!
I also remember how it used to be, i.e. in order to find the answer, you had to write to the HMRC back in the UK and ask them to kindly send you on a statement of your contributions. Well I recently found out that online services have finally reached the good old jobs and pensions department of the UK government!
You can now check all of this information and even get a forecast of what your pension should be when you eventually reach the rip old UK state pension age – and as long as you have a national insurance number and a passport (which of course we all do) it’s a pretty pain free expeirence, as we are about to find out.
In order to check your information you need to sign up for a UK Government Gateway Account and to start that process (it’s easy, honest) you just direct your web browser to the page www.tax.service.gov.uk/check-your-state-pension and click on the “continue” button. On the next page you should click on the “Don’t have a Government Gateway Account” and you’ll be taken through a series of questions which are easy to answer if you have your national insurance number and passport to hand. Once you’re done you will have a Government Gateway ID number and password which you can use to gain access to the link above.
After logging in you can see a whole bunch of useful information, such as the number of contributions (by year) that you have made, this information will help you see the amount of pension you can expect to receive and also how much you might have to pay in additional contributons to top it up to a full pension. It can also tell you if you will reach full contributions before you are of pensionable age, again very useful information.
There’s also an ‘App’ (isn’t there always nowadays?), that you can use in conjunction with this service. Download it from the relevant Android or Apple stores and it allows you to setup secure access to the service, so that you can access it easily in the future – just search for HMRC on your store to get the app.