Source: The Guardian, “‘Costing billions’: is the pensions triple lock a lifeline or simply unaffordable?”, published 12 September 2026, ahead of the Budget scheduled for 28 October 2026. State Pension rates and rules below are GOV.UK’s own published figures for 2026/27. Cost figures are from the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Office for Budget Responsibility; the Resolution Foundation quote is from its own 10 June 2026 press release.
Our view, before the detail
This is a genuine political fight, not a manufactured one. The state pension is now the single biggest item pushing up welfare spending this Parliament, and the triple lock is the specific mechanism making it grow faster than prices or wages alone would. It is also, on Age UK’s account, the reason today’s pensioners are not living through the kind of real-terms decline that hit the basic pension through the 1980s and 1990s. Both of those can be true at once, and the argument over which matters more will run for years, well past this particular Budget. What we think is worth saying plainly: nobody reading this can vote on the triple lock this week, but everybody reading this can check their own forecast, work out what the current published rate actually means in pounds, and build a plan that survives whichever way the argument eventually goes. That is the only part of this story that is actually in your hands.
What the triple lock actually is
Each April, the State Pension rises by whichever is highest of three figures: growth in average earnings, measured May to July; the rise in prices, measured by CPI inflation to September; or a floor of 2.5%, whichever of the three turns out biggest. Introduced in 2011, the floor is the part that makes it expensive over time — even in a year of flat wages and low inflation, the pension still rises by at least 2.5%, above and beyond what the cost of living or average pay packets actually did.
The last four years show exactly why the bill has grown: rises of 10.1% in 2023, 8.5% in 2024, 4.1% in 2025 and 4.8% in 2026, driven mostly by the inflation spike of 2022–23 and the earnings growth that followed it. The full new State Pension went from £230.25 a week in 2025/26 to £241.30 a week in 2026/27 — £12,547.60 a year — on 35 qualifying years of National Insurance. Anyone who reached State Pension age before 6 April 2016 is more likely on the older basic State Pension, which rose from £176.45 to £184.90 a week over the same period, £9,614.80 a year, usually topped up by an additional or graduated pension on top of that base figure.
Why it’s under pressure right now
The Institute for Fiscal Studies puts total State Pension spending at roughly £154bn this year, about £16bn a year higher than it would have been without the triple lock. The Office for Budget Responsibility, in its own words, says the policy “has cost around three times more than initial expectations” because of how volatile both inflation and wage growth have been since 2020 — a mechanism built to smooth over ordinary economic wobbles has instead ratcheted upward through several unusually large ones in a row. Looking further out, projections for keeping the triple lock through to 2050 put the added annual cost in a range between £5bn and £40bn a year in today’s money, with £20bn a commonly used central figure — a wide range precisely because it depends on decades of future inflation and earnings nobody can forecast reliably yet.
Ruth Curtice, chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, called it “a terribly designed policy that has proven to be far more expensive than originally planned” in a June 2026 statement, and the think tank has argued a smoothed earnings link would achieve the same protection at a fraction of the cost. The British Chambers of Commerce has called for the money to be redirected toward youth unemployment. Age UK takes the opposite view: that the triple lock is what rebuilt the pension’s value after decades in which it fell behind average earnings, and that unpicking it risks recreating that decline. Both main parties have committed to keep the triple lock for the rest of this Parliament, so this Budget itself is not expected to change the mechanism — the pressure is about what happens after 2029, and it is loud enough now that it is worth understanding rather than ignoring.
Illustrative figures, built on the published 2026/27 rate and a hypothetical run of identical future rises applied to two different starting points. Take the £5.29-a-week gap above and run it forward. If both the actual £241.30 rate and the floor-only £236.01 rate then received identical 3% rises for the next four years — a made-up but simple assumption, purely to show the mechanism — the actual path reaches £271.59 a week by 2030/31, while the floor-only path reaches £265.64. The gap has grown from £5.29 a week to £5.95 a week, without a single year of different treatment after the first. Every future rise is a percentage of whatever base a pensioner is already on, so one smaller uprating early on quietly compounds for the rest of a retirement that can easily run twenty years or more.
What you can actually control this week
- Check your own forecast, not the headlines. gov.uk/check-state-pension takes about fifteen minutes and shows your own qualifying years, gaps and forecast — none of which moves because of a newspaper story or a Budget speech that hasn’t happened yet.
- Treat £12,547.60 a year as a floor, not a plan. That is the full new State Pension for 2026/27, and it sits well below most people’s idea of a comfortable retirement on its own. Our pension reality check sets out what needs to sit on top of it and why starting early matters more than starting big.
- Plan as if future rises could be smaller than 2023–2026’s. Those four years were unusually large because inflation and wages were both volatile, which is the OBR’s own explanation for why the policy has overshot its original cost. Building your own plan around a smaller assumption means you end up ahead if the triple lock survives, and unaffected if it doesn’t.
- Work out your own number for “enough.” Our when can you actually retire guide turns a vague hope into a date and a figure you can plan around, using your own income and spending rather than the national averages in this article.
- Diary 28 October, not as a worry, as a check-in. Nothing about the triple lock changes before then, and both main parties have committed to keep it for the rest of this Parliament regardless of what the Budget contains. React to what is actually announced, not to speculation about it.
What is still uncertain
Nothing has been decided. The Guardian piece is a snapshot of an ongoing argument, not an announcement, and both the government and the opposition have said the triple lock is safe for the rest of this Parliament, which runs to 2029. What happens beyond that — whether it survives the next manifesto round, whether a smoothed earnings link replaces it, whether the 2.5% floor is the part that goes first — is genuinely not known, and anyone stating it with confidence is guessing. What is fixed and verified today is the rate itself: £241.30 a week on the full new State Pension, £184.90 on the full basic State Pension, both current for the 2026/27 tax year, both published by GOV.UK and unaffected by the debate happening around them.
If you want the other half of your own State Pension picture — whether your own National Insurance record actually reaches the years needed for that full rate — our pension reality check and the low earners’ pension tax relief top-up both cover pieces of it. And if the wider retirement picture feels like too many moving parts to hold in your head at once, that is exactly what coaching is for.