Martin Lewis helped a woman boost her state pension by “thousands” of pounds with just a small £31 payment.
The money saving expert has described this move as one of the “biggest, single, possible money gains” people can make.
Paula said: “We watched your pension special and then checked and found out a £31 payment would get us an extra year of pension worth thousands.”
Mr Lewis explained that £31 would be a part-year payment.
He added: “Each extra year of pension is worth £300 a year. If she lives 60 years into a pension, £31 would turn into £6,000 inflation-proof.”
The payment was made as a voluntary National Insurance contribution.
Martin Lewis helped a woman boost her state pension by “thousands” of pounds
PA
Currently people can plug gaps back to 2006, but from April 2025, they will only be able to pay for voluntary contributions for the past six tax years.
To qualify for any state pension, Britons need at least 10 qualifying years of contributions, while a full new state pension, now increased to £221.20, requires at least 35 qualifying years.
Just because someone has paid their National Insurance, it does not automatically mean they have earned a qualifying year, there is a set criteria to take into account.
A qualifying year is one in which someone was:
- working and made National Insurance contributions
- getting National Insurance credits for example if they were unemployed, ill or a parent or carer
- paying voluntary National Insurance contributions
Customers can access the Check your State Pension forecast via GOV.UK or via the HMRC app to check if there are gaps in their National Insurance record.
Martin advised his viewers: “If you have gaps between 2006 and 2018, you need to think about this this year because you can only do it until next April. If you’re nearly at the state pension age it’s easy to see, it’s pretty obvious that you should be buying them.
“The older you are, the more likely you should be. If there are no gaps after 2019, then you could buy those so you could wait and see.
“If you’re under 45 this probably isn’t worth doing, unless you’ve got very cheap partial years, if you’ve got a year available for £16 just go and buy it because it’s so cheap just in case you miss years in the future because it’s so cheap for what it could be worth.”
“You need a minimum 10 years to get a state pension so a warning here. If you’ve only got three years, and you’ve got three years missing, there’s no point buying those three years because you’ll still only be on six years and you still won’t get the state pension.
“If however you’re on nine years and you can buy a year, suddenly you’ll have 10/35ths of your pension and it will be massively lucrative, worth £3,000 a year for £800. So if you’ve got very limited years it could either be very lucrative or not lucrative.”