Check your State Pension forecast

The forecast service reads your actual National Insurance record and tells you how much State Pension you could get, when you can get it, whether you can increase it, and how you could increase it — for example by paying to fill gaps. Nothing on this site reads your record; the tables here work the general rules, and the forecast works your case.

GOV.UK adds its own caution: State Pension age is reviewed regularly, so a forecast can change.

The calculator page applies the statutory proportion — 35 qualifying years for £241.30 a week, 10 to get anything, a proportion in between. That is correct for a record which started after April 2016 and it is not a forecast: it does not model a starting amount, a protected payment or a contracted-out deduction, and each of those can move the answer.

A gap is a tax year in which you paid no National Insurance and were credited with none. That happens when someone is employed on low earnings, unemployed without claiming benefits, credited for less than a full tax year, self-employed with small profits, or living or working outside the United Kingdom.

Where voluntary contributions are available, the 2026/27 rates are £3.65 a week for Class 2 and £18.40 a week for Class 3. Which class applies to a given year depends on why the gap is there and on your employment status.

This is the part worth reading before you pay anything. Voluntary contributions do not always increase your State Pension — for example where you were contracted out. Paying for a year that does not raise your entitlement raises nothing at all.

Some people cannot pay at all: anyone with no gaps in their record, a married woman or widow paying reduced-rate National Insurance, and anyone past the deadline for the period concerned. GOV.UK’s own record check states, for each of your years, what it would cost and whether paying it would benefit you. Check that before paying, not after.

If you do not claim at State Pension age, your entitlement defers automatically. You earn one increment for each whole week deferred, and an increment is worth 1% of your own weekly rate for every 9 weeks — so nine weeks of deferral is worth 1%.

There is a floor: if the total increase would come to less than 1% of your weekly rate, no increase is paid.