State pensioners have just hours to claim £33,000 boost

An urgent call has gone out to state pensioners and those planning for their retirement to see if they can boost their payments. You may be able to increase your state pension by thousands of pounds by topping up your National Insurance contributions.

Normally you can only top up over the past six tax years but at present, you can pay up as far back as the 2006/2007 tax year. But the deadline to do so is today (April 5) as this tax year ends.

You typically need 35 years of NI contributions to get the full new state pension, which currently pays £221.20 a week. Payments are increasing 4.1% from this month, with the full new amount rising to £230.25 a week.

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Amy Knight, personal finance expert at , spoke about the huge financial boost you could get by topping up. She said: "Just four missing years could see your annual state pension income reduced by £1,310 per year.

"Over a 25-year retirement, this could amount to a loss of almost £33,000 or more as the state pension increases. Until midnight April 5, 2025, voluntary contributions are being accepted for the tax years 2016-17 and 2017-18, but once the window to plug holes in your NI record for these years closes, you won’t get another chance."

She said people who may be missing NI contributions include self-employed workers, stay-at-home parents, or those who have worked part-time hours. Ms Knight also pointed out that the process to top up is very simple.

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She explained: "It takes just 15 minutes to log into the Government website to check your NI record, find out if you're eligible to make voluntary payments to turn these into qualifying years, and complete the transaction to HMRC using online banking. Take a moment to dig out your Government Gateway ID so that you’re ready to log in, and check how much you have available in savings, outside of your emergency fund, before you start."

Figures from HMRC showed some 120,000 people have topped up their contributions, with 260,000 years' worth of gaps filled in. Sarah Pennells, consumer finance specialist at , warned that many people are still unaware of the deadline today.

She said: "It’s encouraging to see so many people have noted the upcoming deadline and filled their National Insurance gaps, and that HMRC’s digital service is allowing easy access. Through recent research with 4,000 UK adults, we found that almost three quarters of people weren’t aware of the April 5 deadline to top up their state pension.

"Only around half of people had checked their state pension forecast (53%), with 3 in 10 of those aged 50-69 not having done so. A third of people said they’d found gaps in their National Insurance record but only one in ten had tried to buy voluntary National insurance contributions."