Martin Lewis is urging people to buy back missing National Insurance years (Image: ITVX)
Martin Lewis is urging people to check if they can add as much as £79,000 to their by buying missing National Insurance years in your pension record with .
Martin Lewis will take to ITV1 and ITVX tonight, February 11, 2025, to talk about the rapidly approaching deadline for missing National Insurance records for your pension.
After April, 13 years which you can currently buy back will be closed to buy-backs forever, meaning you will never be able to increase your by the amount you could have if you fail to act in time, Martin will announce tonight.
Because the amount you get in your depends on how many years of National Insurance contributions you have on record – you need roughly 35 to qualify for the full amount of £221 a week – if you’re missing years from your back catalogue, you could boost your massively by buying them back.
For every £800 you spend on buying a missing year, you could add as much as £6,100 per year on average to your pension pot, Martin will tell his viewers.
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And how worthwhile it is will increase as you get closer to retirement age. If you’re not over 45 it ‘probably isn’t worth doing’ unless you have large gaps in your National Insurance records.
Previously, during the winter series of Martin’s ITV show, Martin said that the deadline is rapidly approaching in April 2025.
During his last National Insurance years buyback special, Martin told his viewers: “If you have gaps between 2006 and 2018, you need to think about this this year because you can only do it until… April.
“If you’re nearly at the age it’s easy to see, it’s pretty obvious that you should be buying them.
“The older you are, the more likely you should be. If there are no gaps after 2019, then you could buy those so you could wait and see.
“If you’re under 45 this probably isn’t worth doing, unless you’ve got very cheap partial years, if you’ve got a year available for £16 just go and buy it because it’s so cheap just in case you miss years in the future because it’s so cheap for what it could be worth.
“You need a minimum 10 years to get a so a warning here.
“If you’ve only got three years, and you’ve got three years missing, there’s no point buying those three years because you’ll still only be on six years and you still won’t get the .
“If however you’re on nine years and you can buy a year, suddenly you’ll have 10/35ths of your pension and it will be massively lucrative, worth £3,000 a year for £800. So if you’ve got very limited years it could either be very lucrative or not lucrative.”
Each year you’re missing – for example if you didn’t earn enough, or you were ill or abroad – could add as much as £5,400 per year to your if you’re male and £6,100 per year if you’re female.
If you’re missing 13 years and buy them all back, that makes a total of £79,300 extra in your if you’re female and £70,200 if you’re male.
Martin heard from a couple who decided to look into their National Insurance contributions after watching Martin’s show. They found their pension forecast was about £172 per week.
But by paying about £4,000 each to the government, they increased each of their state pensions by £1,612 per year.
“Over a 20 year period collectively that’ll be nearly £64,000,” the man told Martin.
“That’s not how much we’ll get, that’s how much extra we’ll get on top of what we would have got if we hadn’t paid the money.”