Claimed child benefit before May 2000? Your pension record may have gaps

There is a gap in many older National Insurance records that costs real money, and the form that fixes it is free.

If you claimed Child Benefit before May 2000 and did not put your National Insurance number on the claim, your record can show blank years for time you had actually covered. HMRC says women now in their 60s and 70s are the most likely to be affected.

What Home Responsibilities Protection was

Home Responsibilities Protection, usually shortened to HRP, ran from 6 April 1978 to 5 April 2010. It cut the number of qualifying years a parent or carer needed for a full basic State Pension. You should have got it automatically if you were awarded Child Benefit for a child under 16 for a full tax year, or Income Support while looking after someone sick or disabled.

National Insurance credits for parents and carers replaced HRP from 6 April 2010. HRP already held was converted into qualifying years, if you needed them, up to a maximum of 22.

Why it went missing

Before May 2000 you did not have to put your National Insurance number on a Child Benefit claim. Where it was left off, the protection was never recorded against the person who earned it.

HMRC began writing to people it could identify in autumn 2023, in phases, starting with those closest to State Pension age. But a letter only reaches someone the records can find, and this is by definition the group whose records are wrong.

The thing most people get wrong

This is not the same as buying voluntary National Insurance to fill a gap. Class 3 voluntary contributions cost £18.40 a week in 2026/27, so a full year is £956.80. Claiming missing HRP costs nothing. You are not buying a year. You are reclaiming one you already earned and were never credited with.

People who muddle the two go wrong in one of two directions. Some pay for years they were already owed. Others hand a share of the correction to a company for sending in a free form on their behalf.

How to check

Check your National Insurance record on GOV.UK and look for gap years that line up with the time you were raising children or caring for someone. If full tax years between 1978 and 2010 are missing, GOV.UK has an eligibility check you must use before applying, and an online application. You can also ask the National Insurance helpline to post you form CF411.

GOV.UK sets no deadline on the Child Benefit route. One other route has closed: HMRC’s manual says claims from carers for tax years from 6 April 2002 to 5 April 2010 carried a three-year limit, and it is now too late to make them. For the years between 6 April 1978 and 5 April 2002 there is no time limit. A record only pays at the right rate once it is corrected, so the waiting is all one way.

One thing to keep separate. This is the State Pension, built from your National Insurance record. It is not a workplace scheme. If you work in the NHS, your scheme contributions are a different deduction under different rules, and those are set out on our NHS pension contributions page. How we check the figures here is on our methodology page.

Where these figures come from

• Home Responsibilities Protection — GOV.UK
• Home Responsibilities Protection: correction of National Insurance records and State Pension entitlement — GOV.UK
• NIM41350 — Home Responsibilities Protection: claiming HRP — HM Revenue & Customs
• Missing out on Home Responsibilities Protection? — MoneySavingExpert

Every figure traces to a dated document — the line this section is named after. If one here is wrong, tell us and it gets fixed publicly. Work out your own figures.