Martin Lewis’ Money Saving Expert (MSE) recently warned millions of Brits to take action on what he said was ‘the single most lucrative thing you can do with your money’.
According to the finance guru, this lucrative thing was a simple check of your national insurance record to see if you had any gaps.
If you did, you could boost your retirement fund by buying back missing years, with many people under the age of 73 able to add upwards of £10,000 to their state pension pot by doing so.
The deadline for topping up your state pension in this way was April 5, however the expert has since revealed that millions are still entitled to the top-up, following a HRMC error.
Ahead of the deadline many people reported that they were unable to use the HMRC’s online service and thus couldn’t complete the form in time.
Around 21,000 people who were eligible for a top up missed out on the deadline as the form was mistakenly taken down a day early. However, HMRC says they are able to identify all the customers who attempted to use the service on Saturday, April 5.
As such, they plan to contact all of those who were affected by the error and are entitled to top up to make sure that they don’t miss out on the money.
A HMRC spokesperson said: ‘We’re sorry that customers were unable to use our online service on Saturday to top up National Insurance contributions for years prior to 2021. We will contact anyone affected directly about the payments they wanted to make to ensure they don’t miss out.’
It’s not currently clear how they will contact people, or how long it will take for people to be notified.
However, the pros over at Money Saving Expert (MSE) have urged people to hang on to any proof they took when encountering problems on the HMRC site, such as screenshots, and if they don’t hear anything they can ‘try to contact HMRC [themselves] via its various NI channels’.
If you managed to submit the form before the deadline, you won’t be impacted by this issue.
How to boost your pension
According to MSE, buying back missing years in your national insurance record could massively boost your pension.
Your state pension is determined by how many years you have paid national insurance (NI). As a general rule, you need about 35 years to get the maximum amount, which is currently set at £221.20 a week.
However, some people may have gaps in their NI record for a variety of reasons:
- You were earning a low wage (it’s only mandatory to pay NI if you earn more than £242 per week from one job), or were unemployed.
- If you were self-employed making small profit margins
- You lived or worked outside the UK for a period of time
Until April 5, men aged under 73 and women aged under 71 were able to buy missing years between 2006 and 2018, ahead of the launch of the ‘new’ state pension.
After this date, you can only do it to 2019, potentially meaning you’ve missed out on the years you needed to boost your retirement.
And when we say boost, we mean it. One MSE subscriber emailed into the financial advice platform to share just how lucrative the hack was.
‘My wife had 10+ years missing,’ David wrote. ‘Her pension forecast was £69/wk, but a (large £8,200) contribution to fill the gaps increased it to £132/wk.’
This equates to a £3,280 per year jump — a staggering £60,000 if his wife draws her pension for 20 years.
The process to fill in the gaps is pretty straightforward.
Step one is to check your national insurance record on the UK Government website.
If you do have any missing years, MSE says it’s worth using the Government’s state pension forecaster to determine how much pension you’ll get with your current NI record. If you’re already getting the full state pension – which will show as a £221.20 a week forecast – there’s likely no point in buying back any years.
Bear in mind too, if you’re still a way off retirement, you still may have plenty of time to make up enough years, so you might not need to fill those gaps.
In some cases, you may not even have to pay for a full year (which typically costs £824), so the risks of spending more than you’ll get are effectively ‘diminished’.
‘What matters most here is whether you’re on track to get the full forecast, the cost of the years, and your age right now,’ adds Martin.
The Government website can help you decide whether to buy back certain years, and how to do it, and you can find more information on the MSE website.
This article was first published on March 5, 2025.
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