Martin Lewis has urged people to check if they would benefit from paying National Insurance contributions towards their state pension. You can voluntarily pay contributions if you have some missing from your NI record, which could potentially boost your state pension entitlement.

A listener to his BBC podcast wrote in to tell Mr Lewis he had secured a major boost to his pension thanks to a tip from Martin Lewis urging him to check if he could buy contributions. This person previously had just nine years of NI contributions, and you need to have at least 10 years’ worth to get any state pension when you claim the benefit.

You typically need 35 years of contributions to get the full new state pension, which is currently £230.25 a week. Payments are increasing 4.8 percent next April in line with the triple lock, lifting the full new rate to £241.30 a week, or £12,547.60 a year.

The listener was able to buy 18 years’ worth of contributions, under a previous extended scheme which ended in April 2025. You can usually only buy contributions up to six years ago, but this was extended for a period, allowing voluntarily contributions as far back as the 2006/2007 tax year.

Mr Lewis explained: “You bought 18 years, it probably cost you depending on if you were self employed or not, somewhere in the region of £10,000 to £15,000, so quite a lot of money.

“But on the back of that, you would get I would estimate around £120 a week state pension, which is about £6,000 a year. Let’s say you live 20 years from your pension age, which would be a typical life expectancy – that’s £120,000 and that is inflation proofed because of the triple lock.”

Having 18 years of NI contributions would get you around £124 a week in state pension, almost £6,500 a year. Mr Lewis added a word of warning for people thinking of topping up.

‘Very lucrative’

He said: “The whole issue about April 2025 is that was the deadline for going back to 2006. The rules now are that you can only go back six years.

“It was about the transition from the old state pension to the new state pension. If you are missing years in the last six years, it is worth checking and doing the maths.

“There are some guides online that will help you deciding whether it is worth you buying those extra years to make sure that you’re getting the full state pension. If you are missing years, it can be very lucrative but it isn’t right for everyone and it’s a bit of a process.”