How to Check Your State Pension Forecast and National Insurance Record

Understanding exactly where you stand with your State Pension is one of the most important steps you can take, whether you are decades from retirement or approaching State Pension age. Yet many of our clients — including those who have worked in the UK for most of their careers — have never checked their forecast. The process is straightforward, and the information it reveals can directly inform decisions about filling NI gaps, deferring your pension, or planning income in retirement.

This guide walks through the tools available, explains what the forecast tells you, identifies common causes of gaps in the NI record, and sets out what to do if something does not look right.

The Personal Tax Account

The primary tool for checking your State Pension forecast is the Personal Tax Account (PTA) on gov.uk. This is a secure online account managed by HMRC that brings together a number of tax and benefit records in one place, including your National Insurance contribution history and State Pension forecast.

To access the PTA, you need a Government Gateway account — a username and password set up through gov.uk's identity verification system. If you do not already have a Government Gateway account, you will need to create one. The process requires either a UK passport or a UK driving licence for identity verification purposes, along with access to a phone number or email address for two-factor authentication.

Once logged in, navigate to the State Pension section. This will show you:

• Your current State Pension entitlement (what you would receive if you claimed today, or at State Pension age if you have not yet reached it)
• The number of qualifying National Insurance years on your record
• The maximum State Pension you could receive if you contribute for enough additional years
• An indication of whether you have any gaps and whether they can be filled

What the Forecast Actually Shows

The State Pension forecast is not a guarantee — it is a projection based on your NI record to date, assuming you take no further action. The key figures to look at are:

Your current entitlement. This is the amount you would receive per week if you claimed today (or when you reach State Pension age). If you have 35 or more qualifying years, this should show the full new State Pension of £241.30 per week in 2026/27 (£230.25 in 2025/26). If you have fewer than 35 years, the figure will be proportionally lower.

Your qualifying years. This is the total number of tax years in which you have either paid sufficient National Insurance contributions or been credited with them. You need a minimum of 10 qualifying years to receive any State Pension.

Gaps. Years that appear as gaps — either missing entirely from your record, or marked as incomplete — may be eligible to be filled by paying voluntary NI contributions. The forecast will usually indicate whether additional years would increase your State Pension.

What Causes Gaps in Your NI Record?

A gap year in your NI record is a tax year in which you did not pay enough National Insurance contributions and did not receive NI credits to cover it. There are many common causes, and we see most of them among our client base:

Working abroad. If you spent time working outside the UK — whether as an employee or self-employed — you will not have been paying UK NI unless you made voluntary contributions. Years spent working in another country will often show as gaps unless covered by Class 2 or Class 3 contributions.

Low earnings. If your earnings fell below the Lower Earnings Limit in any tax year, your contributions may not have been sufficient to make that year a qualifying one. This commonly affects people who worked part-time, took career breaks, or had reduced-hours periods.

Self-employment without Class 2 contributions. Self-employed people pay Class 4 NI on profits, but it is Class 2 contributions (a flat weekly amount) that count toward the State Pension. If you were self-employed but did not register for or pay Class 2, those years may be gaps.

Studying or travelling abroad. Years spent in full-time education or travelling are not automatically covered unless NI credits apply.

Caring responsibilities without claiming credits. People who took time out of the workforce to care for children or elderly relatives may have gaps if they did not claim NI credits. Child Benefit claims for children under 12 automatically trigger NI credits, but carers who did not claim Child Benefit (or who cared for adults) may have unprotected gaps.

Gaps in employment. Periods between jobs where neither NI contributions nor credits were received will appear as gaps.

National Insurance Credits: What They Are and Who Gets Them

NI credits are an important safety net that can fill gaps without requiring actual payment of contributions. They are awarded in specific circumstances, and understanding them can be the difference between a gap and a qualifying year.

The most significant sources of NI credits are:

• Child Benefit: If you claim Child Benefit for a child under 12, you automatically receive NI credits. This was an important route for parents who took time out of the workforce to care for young children. Note that the high-income Child Benefit charge has led some higher-earning households to stop claiming Child Benefit, inadvertently losing NI credits in the process.

• Carer's Credit: Available to those providing at least 20 hours per week of unpaid care to a person receiving certain disability benefits.

• Jobseeker's Allowance and Employment and Support Allowance: Claimants receive NI credits while on these benefits.

• Statutory Sick Pay, Maternity Pay and similar: NI contributions are paid via the employer on these payments in the normal way.

If you think you should have received NI credits but they are not showing on your record, you can contact HMRC's NI helpline to query this.

Checking from Abroad

The Personal Tax Account is accessible from overseas. You will need your Government Gateway credentials and a reliable internet connection. Some clients who have been abroad for many years find that they cannot complete the identity verification step online because they no longer have a valid UK passport or driving licence. In this case, you can request your State Pension forecast by completing form BR19, which can be downloaded from gov.uk and submitted by post to the Future Pension Centre.

The Future Pension Centre also handles general forecast queries and can be contacted by phone (their number is on gov.uk, with an international dialling option). Response times for postal enquiries can be several weeks, so we recommend initiating this process well in advance of any decision-making deadline.

The Pre-2006 Gap Filling Deadline

For several years, the government offered an extended window to fill gaps in NI records going back to April 2006. The original deadline was extended to April 2025. If that deadline has now passed, the standard rule applies: you can generally only pay voluntary contributions to fill gaps in the last six tax years. Gaps older than six years are typically no longer fillable except through NI credits being applied retrospectively.

If you are reading this after April 2025, you should check the current rules on gov.uk, as the government may have introduced updated provisions. We stay current with these deadlines and can advise on what remains possible.

What to Do If the Forecast Seems Wrong

NI records are not infallible. Common errors include:

• Missing contribution years from self-employment (particularly if you changed accounting arrangements)
• Contributions paid through an employer that were not correctly credited
• Years where NI credits should have been applied but were not
• Periods working abroad under a social security agreement where contributions should have been transferred

If you believe your record is incorrect, contact the NI helpline. You will need to provide evidence of your employment or contributions — payslips, P60s, or correspondence from HMRC are all useful. Errors can be corrected retrospectively, but the process takes time, so acting promptly is important.

Acting on Your Forecast

Once you know your current entitlement and have identified any gaps, the next step is to decide what action is worth taking. This depends on how many years you have to go before State Pension age, how many qualifying years you already have, and the cost of filling each gap.

A year of Class 3 voluntary contributions costs approximately £923 in 2025/26 (£17.75 per week × 52 weeks). Each additional qualifying year adds approximately £6.89 per week to the new State Pension (£241.30 ÷ 35 years). Over a 20-year retirement, that extra £6.89/week amounts to around £7,165 — a return of more than seven times the cost of filling the gap. The case for filling gaps in most situations is compelling, though the precise calculation depends on individual circumstances.

We cover the mechanics of voluntary contributions in detail at /uk-pensions/guides/class-2-class-3-ni-contributions-overseas and the specific question of which gaps to prioritise at /uk-pensions/guides/gaps-in-ni-record-how-to-fill-them.

Pension rules, contribution rates, and the availability of gap-filling are subject to change. This guide reflects the position as of 2026, but we strongly recommend verifying current rules and seeking regulated advice before making any contribution decisions.

How Global Investments Can Help

Checking a State Pension forecast is relatively straightforward once you have access to the Personal Tax Account, but interpreting what it means for your retirement plan is a different matter. We help clients understand whether their current forecast is sufficient, whether filling gaps is financially worthwhile given their planned retirement destination and age, and how the State Pension fits alongside private pensions, investment income, and other assets.

For clients living abroad or planning to retire overseas, we pay particular attention to the interaction between NI contributions and the frozen pension rules in their destination country. There is little point in paying significant sums to top up an NI record if the resulting pension will be frozen — the answer depends on timing, destination, and the client's wider financial plan, and we work through each case individually.