Steve Webb: Our retirement pain uncle answers your questions
My husband passed away in 2008. He was 60, I was 47 and a full-time nurse. He received no pension and unfortunately died before retirement age.
I never received a widow's pension because apparently I was too young.
Can I claim his pension when I reach state pension age? I am currently 63 years old and have not remarried?
I can't find his social security number, but I have his death certificate and our marriage certificate.
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Thank you for your question. I am sorry to read that your husband passed away before he reached retirement age.
The short answer to your question is that you may receive an additional inherited amount on top of the AOW pension that you have accrued yourself.
However, a lot depends on your late spouse's work history.
As you may know, you fall under the 'new' AOW system, because you will reach retirement age after April 6, 2016.
Broadly speaking, your entitlement under the new system will depend largely on your own record of NI contributions.
If you haven't already done so, you can use the 'check state pension' service on gov.uk to get a prediction of what you are likely to receive yourself.
In addition, you may be able to inherit 50 percent of the 'supplementary state pension' that your deceased spouse accrued during his working life. (This is also called a 'SERPS' pension, which stands for State Income Related Pension Scheme).
This is true, even if your husband unfortunately never received his pension.
If your husband has built up rights under the SERPS scheme, which would be based on his employment from April 6, 1978, then you should automatically have half of this pension added to your state pension upon retirement.
What I can't say without seeing your late husband's NI file is how large this amount might be, or whether there would be any inheritance at all.
The reason for this is that there are two situations in which your deceased spouse may have accrued little or no SERPS pension.
The first would be if he was self-employed. The NI contributions paid by the self-employed helped them build up an old-fashioned 'basic' state pension, but not a 'supplementary state pension'.
STEVE WEBB ANSWERS YOUR PENSION QUESTIONS
So if your husband always paid NI as self-employed, there would be no SERPS pension for you to inherit.
The second scenario where there would be little to inherit would be if your husband was in an 'outsourced' company pension scheme for years.
This includes most 'salary-related' pensions typically offered by large companies, as well as those offered to most public sector employees.
If your husband had been in such a scheme for years, he would not have built up much (or any) 'extra' state pension.
Instead, his income-related pension would have been accrued through his occupational pension scheme.
If you, as a widow, now receive a widow's pension from such a scheme, there is a good chance that you will not receive much extra state pension.
However, if none of these things are true – he wasn't self-employed and he didn't have a company pension or anything like that – then there may be a significant amount of additional state pension that you could inherit.
The easiest way to know for sure is to call the Future Pension Center and ask how much hereditary supplementary state pension you are likely to receive.
Finally, I should explain that I have answered based on your specific circumstances – where your husband died before 2016 and where you are covered by the new state pension system.
The answer would have been different if, for example, you were under the old system or if your husband had died after the 2016 changes.
If other readers have similar questions but under slightly different circumstances, I would encourage them to check out the government's 'tool', which asks a handful of questions about you and the person who died and then gives you a tailored answer based on your individual situation.
You can find this tool: your partner's insurance file and your state pension at www.gov.uk.