Pension enquiry - related to child benefit.

[user48675]

Can anyone help. Pension service currently not running at full capacity (covid). If I have 8 years more NI required to claim full state pension and 10 more years (until youngest dc reaches 12 years of age), then how much is this likely to bring me closer to claiming the full state pension? I am unclear how much claiming child benefit counts toward/makes a difference to final pension. Anyone able to shed any light on this please? I hope to go back to employment at some point as I worked pre dc but interested to know the answer to the above.

If you claim CB while not earning then you get NI credits towards your pension - up until your youngest child is 12

Thanks demented. Do you know what these NI Credits are worth? How much in monetary terms?

Dont know their worth just that it's Class 3 credits you get

www.gov.uk/check-national-insurance-record

www.gov.uk/check-state-pension

I believe you need 35 qualifying years to receive a full state pension

Things could change in the future, like age that pension is paid & amount

If you log in

You can see exactly how much NI you have paid per year !

Every full year of NI credits gets you 1/35 of the new state pension. The new state pension is £175.20 per week, or £9110 per year. So each full year of NI credits will give you £5 per week, or £260 per year.

The calculation was very different in the past because there was a thing called contracting out which meant you got a slightly smaller pension. That applied especially to public sector workers. But the system changed in 2016 and since then all years have counted for 1/35. It does mean that lots of us need more than 35 years of NI credits to top up to the full state pension.

How many days in a year do you have to pay NI for in order for it to count as a full year?

52 but you can buy missing weeks.

52 days or weeks?

Sorry weeks.

Although contracting out was abolished, if you were ever contracted out, you will not receive the full state pension regardless of how many years you paid in.

@ForensicAccountant I don’t think that’s true. I’m not a pensions expert but I have read that you can go on paying extra years and they will in effect replace the years that you were contracted out. paullewismoney.blogspot.com/2016/10/target-155-boost-your-new-state-pension.html