Grandparents doing childcare can get extra £303 in the State Pension from the Department for Work and Pensions ( DWP ).
State pensioners who have grandchildren have been urged to come forward for over £300. Grandparents doing childcare can get extra £303 in the State Pension from the Department for Work and Pensions ( DWP ).
If you’ve helped look after a family member under 12 years old, while their parents are at work, you could get these ‘specified adult childcare credits’ to top up your NI record.
At present, an extra National Insurance credit can increase the full New State Pension by around £303 annually. After Martin Lewis championed the perk, one grandparent wrote to the BBC and ITV star to say: “Martin, I can’t thank you enough for this. This describes our circumstances perfectly. My wife retired five years early to help with our young grandchildren.
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“She was four years short of full state pension. We will now save £3,000 from not having to buy the missing years.” You can apply for specified adult childcare credits if you’re a grandparent, or another family member, caring for a family member under the age of 12.
If you were caring for them but now aren’t, or they are 12 or older, you may still be able to backdate your claim all the way back to 2011. You can also claim if you were over 16 and under state pension age when you cared for the child in your family.
The current state pension age is 66 for men and women, but it may be different for you depending on how old you are. The child benefit is what entitles the parent to NI credits if they either aren’t working, or are working but earning less than £123 a week.
MSE warned: “Specified adult childcare credits can only be received for periods when the child you were looking after was registered for child benefit.
“However, if the unregistered child is then registered – and you are still meeting the conditions for specified adult childcare credits – their child benefit claim can be backdated by three months, which in turn means your claim for NI childcare credits can be backdated by the same amount of time.”
