Julie Stewart jumped at the chance when she found out she could get a larger state pension by paying a one-off lump sum.
She was on track to get just £134 a week when she reached state pension age in November 2023 – significantly less than the full state pension of £203.85 back then.
But, like thousands of older savers trying to boost their retirement income, Julie, 67, has been driven to despair by the infuriatingly long – and worrying – delays.
A year and a half after she first inquired into topping up her pension, it had still not been carried out. Her case was only resolved when Money Mail stepped in.
We have been deluged with complaints from readers who have spent thousands of pounds to boost their state pensions, only for their money to vanish into government coffers for months or even years.
Their difficulties are aggravated because the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and HMRC run the system between them, so cases can easily fall through the cracks.
Shortfall: Roughly 750,000 people a year hit state pension age, and an estimated 100,000 have gaps in their record and could benefit from buying top-ups
Julie worked as an English teacher in Oxfordshire and then moved to France with her teenage daughter in 2002.
She later worked for UK and French employers, but as she neared retirement, she found she had gaps in her National Insurance (NI) record that meant she would not receive the full state pension.
You receive the full new state pension if you have 35 qualifying years of NI contributions.
For every year that you fall short, you lose 1/35th of the full amount. In many cases, you are able to ‘buy’ missing years to make it up.
Julie discovered that the government was temporarily allowing people to buy NI years going back to 2006, rather than just the normal past six years, in a special deal which ran out last April.
‘I did plenty of research and crunched the numbers,’ she says. ‘I came to the conclusion that to buy enough years to achieve a full state pension was the best choice for me –also that it would be a good investment that would pay for itself.’
Should you boost your state pension?
Boosting your state pension can be great value for money if you buy the correct years on your record.
The cost is £17.45 a week or £907.40 to buy a full 2024/25 year if you were employed.
But older years and part-year gaps are cheaper and it’s also less if you were self-employed. The state pension is £230.25 a week or nearly £12,000 a year.
Each one-year top-up will buy you an extra £6.58 a week of state pension, or about £342 a year, so you will get your initial outlay back within three years.
Roughly 750,000 people a year hit state pension age, and an estimated 100,000 have gaps in their record and could benefit from buying top-ups.
Julie adds: ‘My French husband has a good pension and paid all the big bills. What I really missed out was my personal financial independence, which is fundamental.’
As she didn’t have enough savings herself, her daughter – now aged 38 and with a good job in France – agreed to give her an interest-free loan with no rush to pay the money back.
Julie then contacted the DWP to check whether she could improve her state pension. Records can be complicated, so the government advises everyone to check first before handing over any money to avoid costly blunders.
A new online tool –at gov.uk/check-state- pension – now calculates your entitlement automatically for most people.
Stressful wait: Julie Stewart, 67 wanted to make a one-off payment to boost her state pension
But some people are not allowed to use this tool, including those already over state pension age, those self-employed in any of the years they are trying to pay for, and those who lived abroad in the years they want to fill up.
Instead, you must apply to the DWP. If you live abroad, this means contacting its International Pension Centre (go to gov.uk/international-pension-centre or phone +44 [0] 191 218 7777).
Julie fitted this description. So, in November 2023, she submitted a form asking which years it was worth topping up.
‘I checked the progress of my file online about once a month,’ she says.
‘The predictions for the completion of my dossier varied between July 2024 and September 2024. When I checked in July 2024, the progress report said “Completed”.’
Julie phoned HMRC and was told the file had been sent to the International Pension Centre so to call there instead.
‘I made that phone call only to be told that they had not received my information from the HMRC,’ she says. ‘I actually started crying with frustration.’
The man who answered was very kind, but said that although Julie didn’t need to resend a new form from scratch, it would still take another 20 weeks for her file to work through the system.
After five months had passed, Julie contacted Money Mail in early 2025, concerned about missing the now looming April 6 deadline on the special deal.
To her relief, she was informed at the end of January that she could pay £9,900 to fill 12 years of gaps, and transferred the money immediately. But, by April, her state pension payments had still not been increased.
When she logged on to the government website to check the status of her case, the 12 years that she had paid for were still worryingly listed as “Year not full”.
‘I had to stop myself from checking the site several times each day. It became an obsession,’ she says.
After we raised her case with the DWP and HMRC, Julie finally got an increase from about £152 a week to a full £230.25-a-week state
pension and about £1,550 in arrears just in time for a trip to the UK that she had planned for her brother’s 70th birthday.
She says: ‘The extra amount goes towards me fully paying my way, sharing the bills, as I used to do when working.
This is the financial independence that was missing in my life. The sense of not being a burden or dependent on somebody else.
‘I will also put a minimum of €100 into savings each month towards paying my daughter back.’
After we raised Julie’s and several other readers’ top-up problems with the DWP and HMRC, they responded: ‘We apologise to those who have not received the level of service they should have in these cases.
‘When errors are made, we are committed to resolving them as quickly as possible.’
Is your top-up cash missing? Contact pension questions@thisismoney.co.uk. Unfortunately, we can’t help everyone, so we urge people to contact their MPs, too. Find yours at members.parliament.uk/FindYourMP
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