Reacting to HMRC's press release “Almost 7 million adults in the dark about their State Pension”, published 14 September 2026 to mark Pension Awareness Week (15–18 September), in which Myrtle Lloyd, HMRC's Chief Customer Officer, says: “It's never too early, or too late, to check your State Pension forecast. Checking your forecast on the HMRC app takes just a few minutes but can make a real difference to how prepared you feel for the future.” The statistics below are HMRC's own, drawn from a survey of 5,206 consumers carried out between 27 February and 12 March 2026.
Our view, before the detail
This is exactly the kind of number that's easy to read and forget within a minute, because 6.9 million is an abstraction and your own forecast isn't. We'd rather you closed this article, spent the five minutes HMRC is talking about, and came back — the rest of this piece will still make more sense once you're looking at your own numbers instead of a national average.
What makes this statistic uncomfortable isn't ignorance. It's that most of the reasons people give for not checking are completely understandable, and none of them actually protect you from a gap building up quietly in the background. A career break, a few years abroad, a spell of low self-employed profits — all ordinary, all capable of leaving a hole in a record you won't see until you go looking for it.
What HMRC actually found
Of the adults surveyed, 12.5% — 1 in 8 — said they had never checked their State Pension forecast, which HMRC scales up to almost 7 million people across the UK. People aged 45 to 54 were the group most likely to have never checked, which is notable given they're often within twenty years of State Pension age. Only around a third of adults said they'd actually used the HMRC app or the online forecast service to check.
Asked why, the reasons split into a few clear groups: 26% said retirement feels too far away to think about, 24% said they worry about tracking pension pots from previous jobs, 20% said they're concerned about how career breaks might have affected their entitlement, 17% said they only really think about pensions at major financial moments, 9.5% said they simply don't know how to check, and 5% said it sounds too complicated. Every one of those is a reason to check sooner, not a reason it's safe to leave it.
How to check your forecast in five minutes
Go to gov.uk/check-state-pension or open the HMRC app. You'll need a Government Gateway user ID; if you don't have one, the service will help you set one up there and then using your National Insurance number and a form of photo ID. Once you're through, you'll see three things clearly laid out: your forecast weekly and annual amount at State Pension age, the number of qualifying years you already have, and a year-by-year breakdown showing which years are full and which have gaps. If your State Pension age is only a few years away, the online forecast can sometimes stop being shown that close to the date — in that case, the Future Pension Centre can give you the figure directly over the phone.
Illustrative figures based on GOV.UK's published 2026/27 rates. Your own forecast will show your real position — this is to show how the arithmetic works, not a prediction of your pension.
The full new State Pension in 2026/27 is £241.30 a week, £12,547.60 a year, and needs 35 qualifying years of National Insurance on a post-April-2016 record. Divide one by the other and each qualifying year is worth about £6.89 a week, roughly £358.50 a year, of your eventual pension.
Miss one year, and your pension simply pays £358.50 a year less — for as long as you draw it. Say, purely as an illustrative planning assumption, that you draw the State Pension for twenty years after reaching State Pension age: one missing year has cost you around £7,170 over that time, and that's before any future triple lock increases, which are calculated on top of whatever base you end up on rather than on the full rate everyone else gets.
When a voluntary top-up is worth it — and when it isn't
Filling a gap means paying voluntary National Insurance, and the value of doing that depends entirely on your own circumstances, not a blanket rule. Three checks come before any payment.
First, do you actually need the year? If your forecast already shows 35 qualifying years, or shows you're already on track for the full rate through years still to come before State Pension age, paying for an extra year buys you nothing at all. Your forecast will tell you directly whether a given gap year would increase your pension — some won't, particularly ones from a long time ago on an older-style record.
Second, could the gap be filled for free instead? National Insurance credits exist for exactly this reason — Carer's Credit for people caring 20 hours a week or more, credits for claiming Child Benefit for a child under 12 (worth claiming even if you opt out of the payments themselves because of the High Income Child Benefit Charge), and credits linked to certain benefits including Jobseeker's Allowance and Universal Credit. It's worth checking whether a gap year was actually eligible for a credit you never claimed before you pay to fill it as if it were a genuine contribution shortfall.
Illustrative figures based on GOV.UK's published 2026/27 voluntary contribution rates.
A full year of voluntary Class 3 contributions — the standard rate most people pay — costs £18.40 a week, £956.80 for the year, and adds roughly £358.50 a year to your pension for life. Divide the cost by the annual gain and it pays for itself in a little under three years of actually drawing the pension — after that, every extra year you receive it is money you wouldn't otherwise have had.
Some self-employed people with lower profits qualify instead for the much cheaper Class 2 rate: £3.65 a week, £189.80 for the year, which pays for itself in around six months of drawing the pension. Which rate applies to you depends on your specific circumstances during that gap year — check your National Insurance record rather than assume, since paying the wrong rate, or paying at all when a credit would have covered it for free, is money you can't easily get back.
Third, are you even still in time? A temporary extended window let people fill gaps as far back as the 2006/07 tax year, but that closed on 5 April 2025. The standard rule has applied since: you can generally only pay for gaps in the past six tax years, with each individual year's deadline falling on 5 April. If you're reading advice online that mentions filling gaps back to 2006, it's out of date — check your own forecast for what's actually still available to you now.
If your forecast looks wrong, do this this week
Forecasts are usually accurate, but the underlying record occasionally isn't — a job an employer never reported correctly, a credit you were entitled to but was never applied, or years spent working abroad that need voluntary contributions to count. Use “Check your National Insurance record” first, since it shows the year-by-year detail behind the headline forecast figure. If a specific employed year looks missing or short, contact HMRC's National Insurance helpline with a payslip or P60 for that year to hand — employer reporting errors are usually corrected once flagged with evidence. If you're within a few years of State Pension age and want a figure you can plan around, the Future Pension Centre can talk it through directly rather than leaving you working from an online estimate. None of this takes long, but it does take longer the closer you get to actually needing the money, so raise it the week you spot it rather than filing it away.
What is still uncertain
Two things HMRC hasn't said. It hasn't published a target for how far the 6.9 million figure should fall by the next Pension Awareness Week, so there's no public benchmark to hold this campaign against. And while the release names the barriers people report, it doesn't say whether HMRC plans any direct follow-up — letters, reminders inside the app, or similar — for people who still haven't checked once the campaign week has passed. We'll update this page if that changes.
Where coaching ends, and where to go for a personal decision. Checking your forecast and understanding how qualifying years work is coaching territory — it's public information from GOV.UK and HMRC, and every figure above is calculated from their own published rates. Deciding whether voluntary contributions are right for your specific retirement plan, alongside a workplace or private pension, is not something to decide from an article. Go to MoneyHelper's State Pension guidance or call the Future Pension Centre first — both are free. Buzz Money Coach is a trading style of Buzz Money Ltd, which is not authorised to give regulated financial advice and does not. Where a decision about your wider retirement income needs a regulated recommendation, we say so and can introduce you to Equity & General, authorised and regulated by the FCA (No. 474163) — optional, with no obligation, and E&G pays us a commission on introductions that convert.
The headline number here is really an invitation, not a warning: almost 7 million people are one five-minute check away from knowing exactly where they stand, instead of guessing. Whatever your forecast shows, it's a better starting point for a retirement plan than not knowing at all — and if it shows a gap, you now know roughly what that gap is worth, and what it would cost to close.