Retiree 1: Both myself and my husband, we have banked on state pension at 67. I got a lump sum with some of my pension so that is also supplementing what I have now. That will only last so long. So, yes the state pension important and has been a significant part of our planning.
Retiree 2: My main source is my state pension, my NHS pension is very minimal, but it covers some of the bills. But I’ve also got some investments and I seem to be doing okay with that and I’ve won a few premium bonds as well.
Retiree 3: State pension and one tiny, tiny, little, very annoying private pension which I can’t cash in and I get the equivalent of two coffees a month.
Retiree 4: I’m in a better position than a lot. So the state pension – yes, it’s nice to have, but if it didn’t increase, I wouldn’t be looking too badly at that.
Jenny Ross: It might not be marked on your calendar, but this year is the 80th anniversary of the National Insurance Act 1946, the legislation that paved the way for the modern state pension. It’s gone through plenty of changes since then, but the principle is the same: that most people will get a regular payment from the government to help fund their retirement once they reach a certain age.
The state pension is different to a workplace pension, something we’ve covered off already in this podcast series. Under current rules, you won’t get the state pension until you’re 66 years old, but it’s about to go up to 67, and further rises could soon be announced. Meanwhile, there’s plenty of debate around how much the state pension should rise by each year.
So you might be wondering, what does all of this mean for me? That’s why we’ve created this podcast series to help you feel more confident about your future finances. I’m Jenny Ross, editor of Which? Money. Welcome to this podcast from Which?. Episode three: What does the future hold for the state pension?
The age at which you qualify for the state pension isn’t fixed. It’s 66 for now, but there will be a phased increase to 67 between April 2026 and April 2028. For example, if you were born in May 1960, you’ll qualify in June 2026, a month after your 66th birthday. Then people born in June 1960 will qualify two months after their 66th birthday, and so on.
Another rise to 68 is timetabled to happen between 2044 and 2046. The government is required by law to review the state pension age every six years. Its latest review is underway and will be taking into account life expectancy as well as the cost of providing the state pension. This amount has grown significantly over time.
Here is Steve Webb, former pensions minister and now partner at consultancy firm LCP.
Steve Webb: In a way, the growth in the state pension cost is a good news story because by and large it reflects the fact that more of us are on average living for longer – and you have to be careful about averages – but if you go back to the start of the 20th century and think about people just reaching adulthood, over that century, the length of time you could expect to live had gone up well over a decade.
So actually when we reach pension age, we’re then drawing that pension for perhaps 25 years, 20 years, that kind of period of time, which our grandparents' generation just wouldn’t have understood. So that’s good news, but of course you’ve still got broadly speaking the same number of workers paying the national insurance in, but more people for longer in retirement.
What it does mean is if you combine more pensioners living for longer with the pension going up quite quickly, it starts to put quite a cost burden on the working-age population. Now, I should say many retired people would resent the use of the word burden; they would perfectly reasonably say I’ve spent 40, 50 years paying in, this is my right – so I use that word just in a pure economic sense that if there’s no money set aside and we’re spending more on the retired population, we’re asking more in tax and national insurance of the working-age population.
Jenny Ross: So how much is the state pension worth to you? If you’re reaching state pension age after April 2016, you’ll be covered by what’s known as the new state pension, as opposed to the basic state pension. As of April 2026, the new state pension is worth £241.30 a week at its full level. That’s just over £12,500 a year.
But these numbers might not bear any resemblance to what you actually get. That’s because payments are based on your national insurance record. To get the full new state pension, you need to have made 35 years of national insurance contributions. These are known as qualifying years. If you have fewer than 35 qualifying years, but at least 10, you’ll still get a state pension; it’ll just be adjusted to reflect the number of qualifying years you have.
There are various reasons you could have gaps in your national insurance record. For example, you might have taken time out of work to raise children or spent time living abroad. The good news is that you have the option to fill these gaps by making voluntary national insurance contributions. This could mean you end up with a higher state pension.
The cost of these contributions depends on the year you’re looking to fill in, but bear in mind you can only fill gaps in your record from the past six years. You can check if you have any missing or incomplete national insurance qualifying years, as well as how much they’ll cost to fill, at gov.uk.
Just one final note on this: before paying voluntary national insurance contributions, make sure you’re getting any national insurance credits you’re entitled to. These count towards your state pension entitlement in the same way as ordinary national insurance contributions but don’t cost you anything. Reasons you might be eligible include if you’re caring for a child as a parent or grandparent, claiming statutory sick pay, or looking after a sick or disabled person.
Thanks to the government’s triple lock promise, the amount of state pension you get will increase each year by either earnings growth, inflation, or 2.5%, whichever of those is highest. But this promise doesn’t come cheap. So while the government has committed to maintaining the triple lock for the duration of this parliament, its long-term future looks uncertain.
Here’s more from Steve Webb, who was in government when the triple lock was introduced in 2011.
Steve Webb: So I was pensions minister between 2010 and 2015 and when I became pensions minister in 2010, for the previous 30 years, the pension, the retirement pension, had just gone up in line with inflation each year. Now, you may say what’s wrong with that? It keeps pace with spending, with the cost of living. But the trouble is the job of a pension is more than that; a job of a pension is when you don’t have a wage anymore, you don’t want your living standard to fall off a cliff.
You want to maintain the standard of living you had when you were working or something like it. So if the wages are going up faster than prices, which is normally the case, then each year the state pension was falling compared with what people were earning – it’s a falling share of the average wage. And so it meant the cliff edge when you retired was getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So the state pension was really not doing its job anymore.
So the idea of the triple lock which started in around 2011 was to say well, we’ll always meet prices; if the cost of living’s gone up, we’ll always cover that. We’ll always do as well as wages because actually we need to keep tabs with what people in work are getting. And then this third element, this 2.5% floor, said politically sometimes these numbers are just so low it’s almost insulting to pay.
To give you an example, around the year 2000 the pension went up by 75 pence because inflation was really, really low and there was a huge political fuss about that and the following year the government put it up by £5 because it was so embarrassed. So just the politics of tiny-weeny pension increases – those are the three elements.
And each of them, funnily enough, has applied in different years; so sometimes it’s inflation that’s the highest, sometimes it’s wages that’s the highest, sometimes 2.5%. But the point about that is relative to the average wage, the triple lock has improved the value of the state pension, which I think is a good thing, but there probably comes a point where you stop because otherwise the state pension just rises and rises and rises relative to the average wage and becomes completely unaffordable.
So at some point a politician will have to say it’s been great, but we’re switching it off and replace it with perhaps an earnings link of some sort.
Jenny Ross: And it’ll have to be a brave politician who makes that decision. Here’s Tom Selby; he’s the director of public policy at AJ Bell.
Tom Selby: What the triple lock has become is a kind of totem that allows politicians to say we’re doing right by older people. But the challenge of that is that actually over the last 15 years, there’ve been quite a lot of years when earnings and inflation have been low and so the state pension has gone up in real terms by quite a lot.
So the potential cost of that policy going into the future could be gargantuan and so at some point some politician is going to need to be brave enough to say this needs to end. Now, we saw with what happened with winter fuel payments what the public reaction is to politicians taking benefits away from people. Now, this wouldn’t be the politicians taking the benefit away from people, but that’s what it would feel like. So reducing the increases that you get in the state pension will lead to significant blowback for any politician.
Jenny Ross: Anthea is a Which? member who’s been retired for eight years and the state pension forms most of her income. She says she’d be disappointed if the government made any changes.
Anthea: Well, that’s a hugely controversial subject, isn’t it? I would be very upset. This government, if it does renege on the triple lock, then a lot of us will have less income.
Jenny Ross: Robert is a Which? member too. He retired as a wing commander in the RAF in 2025 and recognises that his workplace pension provides enough income for him to live comfortably. But he also knows that for many, the state pension is essential.
Robert: Because of all the people I’ve met through the food bank who are only on a state pension, and some of them because they hadn’t added the additional payments to make it a full pension, weren’t even on a full pension, they’re struggling. So my circumstances aren’t typical, but the state pension I think is important and the need for it to keep pace with inflation to provide security for the older people who have nothing else is really important.
Jenny Ross: When or whether any changes are made to the triple lock remains to be seen. What we do know is that the state pension age will change. But what about your workplace pension? When can you take that money? And how can you take it? This is what we’ll be discussing in the next episode.
In the meantime, we have plenty more pensions advice and news on our website, just go to which.co.uk/retirement. We also have a monthly retirement planning newsletter full of tips and analysis to help you take charge of your savings. Sign up at which.co.uk/retirementnewsletter.
