Can you inherit any State Pension from your spouse or civil partner?
The new State Pension is built on your own National Insurance record, and almost none of it passes to a surviving spouse. The exception is a protected payment, up to half of which can be inherited — which is a small fraction of most people's pension and is the reason each partner's own record matters so much more than it used to.
- The principle: the new State Pension is individual; your record builds your pension.
- The exception: up to 50% of a protected payment can be inherited.
- The old system: additional State Pension could be inherited more generously, on rules that varied.
- The consequence: a household with one strong record and one weak one loses badly on the first death.
01 What can and cannot be inherited
The new State Pension is based on your own qualifying years, and the entitlement is personal. A surviving spouse does not inherit their partner's new State Pension in the way they might have inherited part of the old additional State Pension.
Where the deceased had a protected payment — the excess of their 2016 starting amount over the full new rate — up to half of it can be inherited by a surviving spouse or civil partner. That is the main route by which anything passes on.
There are also transitional cases for people who reached State Pension age before 6 April 2016, where inheritance of the additional State Pension follows the older and more generous rules. Those rules vary with dates of birth and marriage.
Source: The new State Pension
02 What this does to a household
On the first death, one State Pension stops entirely. For a couple with two full new State Pensions that is around £12,548 a year of income disappearing, against household costs that fall by nothing like as much.
For a household where one partner has a full record and the other has gaps, the loss is worse in one direction than the other. Losing the partner with the complete record leaves the survivor on a reduced pension with no inheritance to make it up.
That asymmetry is the practical argument for building both records rather than one. Modelling the year after the first death shows the effect immediately.
Shows: the household's State Pension income before and after the first death. Ignores: protected payments, transitional rules, tax, and any other pension income.
On the defaults above, the worked example shows £12,548 a year. Household State Pension falls from £20,748 to £12,548 on the first death — nothing of the other transfers unless there is a protected payment.
03 What to do about it
Check both forecasts, not one. A household frequently knows the higher earner's position and not the other's, and the second is where the gaps usually are — career breaks, part-time years below the earnings threshold, and unclaimed Child Benefit.
Fill the gaps on the weaker record where they can be filled. A voluntary year adds around £358 a year for life, and on the survivor's own record that income is not lost on the first death.
And check Child Benefit credits, which can be transferred between partners for past years. That is the cheapest repair available and it applies to exactly the record that usually needs it.
Source: National Insurance credits
The new State Pension does not pass to a spouse in any meaningful way, and a lot of households are still planning as though it does. On the first death one whole State Pension stops, and the survivor keeps only their own — which is why a household with one full record and one gappy one is carrying a risk it has not noticed. Go and read both forecasts. Filling gaps on the weaker record is the cheapest survivor protection available, and unlike almost everything else on that subject it costs under a thousand pounds a year.
FAQ
Can I inherit my spouse's new State Pension?
Almost none of it. The new State Pension is built on your own record. The exception is a protected payment, up to half of which can be inherited by a surviving spouse or civil partner.
What about the old additional State Pension?
Where the deceased reached State Pension age before 6 April 2016, the older and more generous inheritance rules for additional State Pension can apply. They vary with dates of birth and of marriage.
How do I protect my partner?
By building their own record rather than relying on inheritance. Check their forecast, fill any gaps that can be filled, and transfer Child Benefit credits for past years where the claim was in the wrong name.
Sources
Regulator references
- The new State Pension · GOV.UK · 2025Sets the qualifying-year rules and the full new State Pension rate this post works from.Last verified: 2026-09-07
- Check your State Pension forecast · GOV.UK · 2025The forecast service this post tells the reader to read before acting.Last verified: 2026-09-07
- National Insurance credits · GOV.UK · 2025The circumstances in which a qualifying year is credited rather than paid for.Last verified: 2026-09-07
Calculator unit tests · the assertions this page's worked example is checked against, and their last result
Changelog
- 2026-09-07 — initial publish (new format)
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Jordan Reeves
Founder of Talk Through Wealth. A software engineer for over a decade before turning to retirement planning, Jordan built the projection engine after watching family members get fragmented, country-by-country advice that never reconciled. He writes about retirement the way the engine computes it: month-by-month, lifetime-long, and skeptical of any rule of thumb that hasn't been run through the math.