At Ascend, we spend our days buried in payroll data, so we’re used to spotting the small errors that quietly turn into big problems years down the line. National Insurance is a classic example. Get a few years wrong, and the impact doesn’t show up on a payslip – it shows up decades later, in a smaller State Pension than you were counting on.
That’s not a scare story. It’s happening to real people, right now, in bigger numbers than most employees realise.
The scale of the problem
HMRC and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) have been running a series of correction exercises after admitting that National Insurance records for hundreds of thousands of people were wrong.
A few figures worth sitting with:
- Over 370,000 people have been written to by HMRC because Home Responsibilities Protection (HRP), the scheme that protected the pension records of parents and carers, mainly through the 1980s, 90s and 2000s, was never correctly recorded against their National Insurance number.
- Underpayments linked to National Insurance record errors reached £390 million in the year to April 2026, with historic HRP mistakes accounting for around six in every ten pounds of that.
- Up to 800,000 people were given State Pension forecasts that were too high, because a fault in the online forecasting tool failed to account properly for years spent “contracted out” of the additional State Pension before April 2016. HMRC only fixed that tool in February 2026 – nine years after the error first appeared!
Put simply: a lot of otherwise careful, organised people have a State Pension record that doesn’t match what they actually paid in or were entitled to. Most won’t find out until they’re close to retirement, when there’s far less room to fix it.
Who’s most likely to be affected
You’re at higher risk of an incorrect record if any of the following apply to you:
- You took time off work to raise children or care for a relative before 2010, particularly if you claimed Child Benefit before May 2000 and didn’t put your own National Insurance number on the claim.
- You worked for an employer with a “contracted-out” workplace pension scheme at any point before April 2016. An old payslip showing the letter D, N or E on the National Insurance line is a sign you were contracted out.
- You’ve had gaps in employment, spent time abroad, or moved between employed and self-employed work.
- You’ve never actually looked at your State Pension forecast and just assumed it would sort itself out.
That last one applies to most of us, if we’re honest. So it is worth everybody checking their National Insurance record and their State Pension entitlement
How to check where you stand
This doesn’t need to be complicated, and it doesn’t need to cost anything. Two free government services will tell you almost everything you need to know:
- Check your State Pension forecast – available through your personal tax account on GOV.UK, or via the HMRC app. This shows the amount you’re currently on track to receive and your State Pension age. For details on how to check, follow this link here
- Check your National Insurance record – this shows, year by year, whether each tax year of your working life counts as a “qualifying year.” Gaps are flagged clearly, along with whether you’re able to fill them. Guidance on how to do this is here.
If you spent time as a parent or carer before 2010 and think HRP might be missing from your record, there’s also a dedicated HRP checker tool and claim form on GOV.UK – worth five minutes of anyone’s time who fits that description.
We’d always recommend doing this even if you feel confident everything’s correct. It typically takes less time than making a coffee, and for something that affects your income for the rest of your life, that’s a pretty good trade.
What to do if you find a shortfall
If your record does show gaps, don’t panic – most shortfalls can be fixed, and there are a few routes, depending on your situation:
Missing HRP
If you’re affected, HMRC will correct your record and backdate any arrears once your claim is processed – you don’t need to pay anything for this, since it was their error.
Voluntary National Insurance contributions
For genuine gap years, you can usually pay voluntary Class 3 contributions to top up your record. For the 2026/27 tax year, that’s £3.65 a week, or roughly £189.80 to buy back a full qualifying year – often very good value against the extra State Pension it can secure over a typical retirement.
Get advice before you pay anything
Not every gap is worth filling, and the rules on how far back you can go are specific. Before paying voluntary contributions, it’s worth calling the Future Pension Centre (or the Pension Service, if you’re already over State Pension age) to check the actual impact on your forecast first. There’s no charge for the
call, and it can save you paying for a year that wouldn’t have increased your pension anyway.
A worked example
Numbers make this easier to picture, so here’s a simple example based on 2026/27 rates:
- Buying back one missing qualifying year through voluntary Class 3 contributions costs £3.65 a week, or around £189.80 for the full year.
- Each qualifying year adds 1/35th of the full new State Pension. With the full rate at £241.30 a week, that works out at roughly £6.89 extra a week, or about £358 extra a year, once you reach State Pension age.
- On those figures, the £189.80 outlay is recovered in well under a year of receiving the State Pension – and every year after that is extra income for as long as you’re retired. Over a 20-year retirement, that one purchased year could be worth over £7,000 in total.
The exact figures will vary depending on your own record and how many years you’re missing, which is exactly why it’s worth getting a personal calculation from the Future Pension Centre before you pay anything. But as a general rule, for most people below State Pension age, filling a genuine gap is one of the better-value financial decisions available.
A final thought
Treat your State Pension forecast the same way you’d treat a payslip: something worth checking rather than assuming is right. It takes minutes, it’s free, and it’s the only way to know for certain whether the contributions you’ve made to date have actually landed correctly on your record.
