The longer you defer your State Pension, the higher your weekly payments to live on as you get older, but the higher the risk that you might not live long enough to see the benefits.
The Department for Work and Pensions ( DWP ) allows you to defer your pension – meaning that instead of getting the money when you are entitled to it, you can ‘save it up’ and add it to your future weekly payments.
If you are entitled to £221.20 a week (£11,502 a year), which is the current full rate for the new state pension, then by deferring for 52 weeks, you will get an extra £12.82 a week, which adds up to an extra £666 a year for the rest of your life.
If you’re approaching State Pension age, for every nine weeks that you defer claiming your pension, your weekly payments will increase by 1 per cent to make up for the money that you’ve missed out on. This means that if you defer payments for a year then you’ll see an increase of nearly 5.8 per cent in your weekly payments for the rest of your life.
The maximum weekly State Pension – for men born after 1951 and women after 1953 – you can receive is currently £221.20 (£11,500 a year) the 2024/25 tax year. To defer drawing your state pension, you don’t have to do anything.
That is because you do not get it automatically – you have to claim it. You should get a letter no later than two months before you reach state pension age telling you how to claim, according to pensions experts this week.
