State pension age: What is the retirement age within the UK?

Here’s what you need to know about the current state pension age of 66 and future changes, so you can find out when you will be allowed to retire. 

What is the state pension age and why is it rising?

For decades, the age at which you could claim your state pension benefits was 65 for men and 60 for women.

But huge jumps in life expectancy saw costs shoot up for the Treasury, which is paying some pensioners for more years in retirement than they spent paying National Insurance as workers.

Life expectancy gains forecasts are lower of late, though only after rising for many years and probably being skewed by the pandemic.

As things stand now, men and women’s state pension age is 66, and between 2026 and 2028 it will rise again to 67. (In 2028, the minimum pension age for accessing workplace and other private retirement savings will also go up, from 55 to 57.)

However, the timing of the next state pension age rise to 68 remains up in the air. 

Officially, it’s scheduled to happen between 2044 and 2046, which would affect those born on or after April 1977. 

Two previous official studies recommended the change should be brought forward, but the last Tory Government ignored them and delayed a decision until after the 2024 election.

The stated reason was the current level of uncertainty about the data on life expectancy, labour markets and the public finances. 

The Government is required by law to review the state pension age every six years, so two further reports are now in the works – one by its in-house actuary and the other by an independent expert – which will look at when to hike to 68.

A report by an independent think tank, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, warned that without reform of the state pension triple lock, the retirement age would have to rise to 74 by 2069.

The trade-offs between the state pension age and annual increases are likely to come under greater scrutiny in future.

Experts say the triple lock tends to benefit better off elderly people who live longer, while raising the state pension age to help fund the higher annual rises disproportionately affects poorer pensioners who have lower life expectancy.

The triple lock means that the state pension increases every year by the highest of inflation. average earnings growth or 2.5 per cent. The Government has promised to stick to the triple lock for the whole of this parliament.

And it has effectively, if not in so many words, told the experts working on the next state pension age reports to operate under the assumption that the triple lock pledge will remain in place indefinitely. 

The Government is likely to give 10 years’ notice of any future rise in the state pension. 

Meanwhile, Governments have in the past tended to keep the state pension and private pension ages roughly 10 years apart, so any future increases could well continue to happen in tandem. 

This combined with a faster rise in the state pension age could cause a serious headache for those hoping to retire earlier. 

The exact date that you get your state pension will depend on the year you were born. You can work this out using Gov.uk’s state pension calculator.

State pension rise to 67 

Starting in April, the state pension age will begin rising from the current 66 in a phased process that will make it 67 for everyone from April 2028.

If your 66th birthday is pending, see the timetable below.

Why is there controversy over women’s state pension age increases? 

Many women born in the 1950s have faced financial hardship while they wait longer than they expected to draw the state pension.

A version of the plans to equalise men and women’s state pension age was outlined in 1995, when the then Conservative Government stated the intention of gradually raising women’s retirement age to 65 between 2010 and 2020.

This was followed in 2007 by a Labour announcement that both men and women would see their retirement age go up to 66 between 2024 and and 2026.

But in 2011, Chancellor George Osborne brought forward the timing of both changes to 2018 and 2020 respectively, hitting women particularly hard because their increases happened both sooner than expected and in quick succession.

Initially, the overhaul included a cap of a maximum two years’ extra wait for a state pension, but protests led to the cap being reduced to 18 months.

Some 2.6million women got five years’ notice of a delay to their pension age.

The Women Against State Pension Inequality or WASPI campaign says it agrees with equalising women’s and men’s pension ages, but not the ‘unfair’ way the changes were implemented. It has fought for measures to cushion the financial blow.

A separate group, BackTo60, brought a legal challenge but this was dismissed by the Court of Appeal in September 2020. 

The Parliamentary Ombudsman then accused the Government of ‘maladministration’ over delays to informing women about the changes. 

It told the Government to compensate women for failing to adequately inform them their state pension age was delayed.

The Ombudsman recommended those affected should receive £1,000 to £2,950 in compensation, which it says would cost £3.5 to £10.5billion if paid to all women born in the 1950s. 

It asked parliament to intervene and swiftly set up a compensation scheme, over the head of the Department for Work and Pensions which refused to do so. 

However, after the 2024 election the Labour Government also decided against giving compensation to women, many of whom have struggled financially because they were unaware of the delay in when they could draw a state pension. The Government carried out a review but confirmed payouts to Waspi women were not required.

Who can get a state pension? 

Not everyone is entitled to the full state pension, which is a regular payment from the Government until you die. Eligibility depends on meeting certain criteria.

As well as being the required age, you must have made National Insurance contributions during your working life, or have paid voluntary National Insurance, or received credits from the government for years spent caring or other issues.

Until April 2016, workers needed to have 30 years of qualifying National Insurance contributions to get the full basic state pension, but everyone retiring since then needs 35 years of contributions to get the new flat rate state pension. 

However, even if you paid in full for a whole 35 years, if you contracted out of paying additional state pension entitlements – S2P and Serps – for some years on top of that it might still reduce what you get.

How much is the state pension? 

The full flat rate state pension is £230.25 a week or nearly £12,000 from April 2025.

People who retired before April 2016 on a full basic state pension receive £176.45 a week or around £9,200 a year. 

But the old basic rate is topped up by the additional state pension entitlements – S2P and Serps – provided they were earned during working years.

People who have contracted out of S2P and Serps to pay less National Insurance over the years and retire after April 2016 might get less than the full new state pension, unless they make up the years in NI contributions. 

The state pension increases every year according to the triple lock, which means whichever is the highest of earnings growth, the inflation rate or 2.5 per cent.

Older people last received an increase in their state pension starting from Monday 10 April 2025, in the first full week of the new tax year onwards. The headline state pension rates were hiked by 4.1 per cent.

This April the headline full state pension is due to rise by 4.8 per cent to around £12,500 a year. That means the current full flat rate will increase from £230.25 to £241.40 a week.

People who retired before April 2016 on a full basic state pension will get a 4.8 per cent rise as well, from £176.45 to £184.90 a week. That’s a rise to £9,600 a year.

How do you improve your state pension? 

Everyone gets the option of deferring their state pension to get more in their later years, and of filling in gaps in their NI record or buying top-ups.

If you delayed taking payments in the past, the rules were more generous, but if you reached state pension age since 2016 you still get the option of an increased state pension for the rest of your life.

If you defer for at least nine weeks, your state pension will get a boost for every week you defer, by the equivalent of 1 per cent every nine weeks or 5.8 per cent every 52 weeks. 

Also, you can stop claiming the state pension after doing so for a period, and therefore get a boost at the rates above, but only once. 

If you carry on working after state pension age, you don’t have to keep paying National Insurance contributions.

Pensioners on a low income might qualify for pension credit. From April 2025, this tops up weekly income to a minimum of £227.10 for single people and £346.60 for couples.