Rtd.

This is what gov gateway says when I look.  I take it that means if I pay a full year this tax year, then I've done enough to get the full pension at 67?  The 2 bullet points in picture 2 confuse me a bit.  What if I don't contribute in those 13 years?  What about the 4 incomplete years?  Surely neither of those things can prevent me from getting the full pension if my 35 years are full and complete?

Thanks. How would I know if I was "contracted out"? What does that even mean? I was born in 1970 if that's relevant.

Humph, of you're kicking your heels looking for something to do, this place probably still needs an admin. 🤪

Just thinking of your mental well being if you're sick of watching the robins from the dining room window.

You almost certainly did opt out if you joined your (private sector) employer’s main pension scheme in the 1990s. I certainly did, and ‘opted out’ appeared in the NI section of my payslips.

Ah. Just looked at mine and it explicitly says that I was in a contracted-out scheme. Like Bromp, I have credits going back to when I was at school, so I already have enough contributions — just can’t collect till I’m 67.

It tells me I can’t improve on £203.85 a week, and that £43 of what my (first) employer’s pension will pay me is generated from the reduced NI that it and I paid back in the day.

I opened the detail view of the years in which I had unpaid spaces between jobs and those are all marked complete too. Some of the gaps were longish but they spanned tax years, so there was always some paid employment to make up the NI, although I suppose it helps to have been a relatively high earner between the gaps.

As others have said being contracted out of the second state pension (it went by various names including SERPS) is what would be expected if you were in a Company Pension. In that case you paid less in NI and part of what the law said you needed was delivered through the Company Pension instead.

The concept of contracting out ended when the New (State) Retirement Pension came in in 2016. We all now pay full NI.

There is a transition/conversion process to convert pre 2016 years into the new scheme. Under that process contracted out years effectively do not count in full for new pension. Trouble is the Government didn't make that clear and a lot of people think that provided they have paid 35 years NICS they will get the headline £203.85.

I think those caught are in my age group rather than yours. With 38 years of 'full' contributions when I left the Civil Service in 2013 I might have assumed I could sit on my jaxie, live on my CS pension, and get £203.85 at 66. In practice I needed to pay quite a few more years to get that much.

Your age group will have enough post 2016 years to make up any shortfall hence the predicted figure.

In your shoes I'd want to be certain of the pension payable if, for any reason, like early retirement, I stopped paying NIs now.

I was one of a group in our early/mid fifties given redundancy by early retirement with an unreduced pension. At that point I stopped paying NI. One of us, at least, went to the Job Centre and arranged 'credits only' Job Seekers and was credited with Class 1 until she found a job.

TL:DR for you Al is that you'll be fine working on. If you wanted to jack it in now you might want to check what happens.

Yup, if you were to do something that meant you'd stop paying (or being credited with) NICs in the near future then I'd ask HMRC what your State Pension would be at 67.