A stupid pension question.

[DareIask]

If husband and wife have both worked and paid NI for the 35 years do they both get max old age pension?

You can check your entitlement here www.gov.uk/check-state-pension

@BadgerFace I've tried but I can't answer all the questions..

You both are independent. It doesn't matter if you are married or not for state pension. It used to but now it's a personal pension.

You need 35 years each of full contributions. I think if you have a year that's part contributions you could make up the difference to cover a full year.

You have until you can draw your pension to make the 35 years full contributions.

Yes, if you each have contributed a full year for 35 years (it doesn't have to be concurrently) then you will get a full pension.

If they haven’t paid reduced NI (contracted out) and are of state pension age, it’s likely they both get the full state pension.
Last time I checked the gov calculator did not consider the contracting out issue but that was some time ago.

Ah, sorry!

I believe that 35 years is the right number of years for full entitlement assuming you’ve paid the required NICs for each of those years and assuming that you weren’t ‘contracted out’ for any of the years.

Thank you all

You may get more than the new state pension depending on how close you are to pension age , when they changed the rules in 2016 they had to make provision for people who had already paid in for more than 35 years otherwise it would have been unfair, so they gave people a starting pension, those whose starting pension is higher than the new pension amount get a protected payment so get more pension , but any NICs/Credits paid after that date does not increase their pension amount, those whose starting pension is lower than the new pension get extra pension for every full year of NICs/Credits until they either get the new state pension amount or reach pension age which ever comes sooner

I reached pension age this month my pension is higher than the new state pension amount even though I opted out for a few years, it worth checking to make sure