Money saving expert Martin Lewis is urging people to check and get as much as £80,000 added to their state pension pot before a looming deadline.
Martin returned to his ITV1 The Martin Lewis Money Show Live on Tuesday night for a one-off special in which he issued an urgent warning.
There, Martin heard from a couple who decided to look into their National Insurance contributions after watching Martin’s show. They found their pension forecast was about £172 per week.
But by paying about £4,000 each to the government, they increased each of their state pensions by £1,612 per year.
“Over a 20 year period collectively that’ll be nearly £64,000,” the man told Martin. “That’s not how much we’ll get, that’s how much extra we’ll get on top of what we would have got if we hadn’t paid the money.”
Martin added: “This is a serious amount of cash and I’m going to try to take you through it step by step.”
Martin said that figure was based on the old pension amounts but since then, because of state pension Triple Lock increases they will get roughly £80,000 more.
Martin said: “There is a deadline coming. This is about the fact that each £800 you pay you could gain £5,400 or more. It’s all about the new state pension that came in in 2016.
“That is for men born after April 5 1951 and women born after April 5 1953.
“To get the full state pension you need to have 35-ish qualifying national insurance years.
“And it is a big ish, it’s not 35 years, it varies on lots of factors so just see that as an ish.
“You gain National Insurance years usually by working, currently you have to earn over £125 a week to get them.
“But millions of people are missing National Insurance years. You might have spent years abroad, you might have had a low income, a career break…
“So my clarion call today is about check now if you can buy missing years.
“It ends this tax year, April 5 2025, until then you can buy back missing years to 2006, after the transitional arrangements end you can only buy back six years, so there are 13 missing years that are going to close this year.”
Martin added that it’s ‘really important’ to prepare yourself.
Martin said that anyone missing years should check gov.uk and check your National Insurance record, then go to state pension summary and see if you’re on track for the full state pension – £221.20 per week.
If you don’t have the full amount, you can look at any missing years back to 2006 but you only have until next April to do it, and it costs up to £800 per year and can take some time to sort – so get onto it as soon as possible.