can I claim my UK state pension early?

Post Reply New Topic

If I am retired due to ill health?

I have herd I can.

I don't know about UK, but here you can retire at the age of 63.
You may retire earlier, in full or in part, but that would require a doctor to make the decision, ie a diagnosis of sorts.

/Mats

Apparently not, according to this:
https://www.gov.uk/early-retirement-pension

There is something called pension draw-down, but AFAIK that only applies to private pensions. You basically take a lump sum early, but when you finally get your regular pension it'll be less, so essentially it's just a form of borrowing. It's probably only worth doing if you're likely to die early.

If there'd been any way to get State pension early on account of ASD, I'd probably have found out about it when I was planning to quit my job. I was very lucky - not long after I quit (when I was 62), the trustees of my workplace pension ordered a review and discovered that anybody with more than a certain number of years of service could get the full workplace pension early. I qualified and they started paying me pension just before my 63rd birthday. It wasn't a big pension, just about enough to pay for the essentials (I don't pay rent, so just food, power, council tax, home insurance) but very handy because I had no income after quitting, and was living on my savings, and I wasn't expecting to have much savings left by the time my pensions kicked in. I don't know how common such workplace pension rules are - I suspect it's rare and that it's getting rarer, and I don't understand how they managed to persuade the employer to include it in the rules, or why.

Here, in the US, if one opts to take Social Security early, at age 62, one would get less of a pension for life.

Same with my work pension, though I’d get the full pension at age 62. I’d get considerably less such I retire now, at 61.

It sure does. I would get 6% less than if I retire at 62.