Reading your State Pension forecast

Check your State Pension forecast, on gov.uk, says when your State Pension starts and how much it could be. Its amounts leave out inflation, so they are in today’s money, as the plan holds them. How the plan uses it, in more detail.

• The date is your State Pension age. The plan works it out from your date of birth, and “State Pension age” in “Edit plan” takes another.
• A full record shows one figure, the most you can get. Its weekly amount goes into “Weekly forecast”. The plan multiplies that weekly amount by a year’s weeks, not the forecast’s yearly figure.
• A record still being built shows two rows. The current estimate is what your record has earned so far. The forecast assumes you keep contributing National Insurance until the date it names.

The full rate of the new State Pension is £241.30 a week, from 6 April 2026.

The plan holds the figure you enter and adds no years to it. The forecast row fits someone who expects to keep paying or being credited National Insurance until then. For anyone stopping sooner, the right figure sits between the two rows.

Someone contracted out before the new State Pension began needs more qualifying years to reach the full rate. The forecast already allows for that. “Qualifying NI years” does not allow for that, so for these people it can overstate the pension.