Guides
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Information only. Nothing on this page constitutes financial, tax, or legal advice. Always seek advice from a qualified, regulated financial adviser before making any financial decision. Read our full disclaimer.
Information only. Nothing on this page constitutes financial, tax, or legal advice. The rules described here are based on information available at the date of publication and can change. A regulated specialist can help you assess your individual position.
A UK State Pension follows you almost anywhere. The annual increase does not. Which side of that line you land on is decided by one thing: the country you are living in when the pension is paid. It has nothing to do with how many years you contributed, or which employer you worked for, or how long you lived in Britain before you left.
This guide sets out the GOV.UK country list in full, the arithmetic of what a freeze is worth over a real retirement, and the two levers that still work in your favour from abroad. Everything factual here is sourced to GOV.UK or to legislation, and linked so you can check it yourself.
If you are still building your National Insurance record from abroad, our guide to voluntary NI contributions for expats covers how the contribution system works and how gaps can be filled.
A frozen State Pension is one that is paid at its current level and then stays there. The payment does not stop and it is not reduced. It simply never receives the April increase again while you live where you live.
GOV.UK puts the rule in one sentence and a short list: "Your State Pension will only increase each year if you live in: the European Economic Area (EEA), Gibraltar, Switzerland, countries that have a social security agreement with the UK (but you cannot get increases in Canada or New Zealand)."
Read that as a closed list, because that is how it operates. If your country is not in one of those four categories, the increase is not applied. The increase in question is the uprating known as the triple lock, which DWP describes in its published benefit rate statistics as the commitment to uprate the basic and new State Pensions every year by the highest of earnings growth, inflation, or 2.5 per cent.
One common misreading is worth clearing up. The freeze is not set by the rate in force on the day you first paid National Insurance, and it is not set by your age. It is the rate in payment while you are resident somewhere off the list, and it holds at that level for as long as you stay there.
GOV.UK publishes the definitive list as "Countries where we pay an annual increase in the State Pension". It has two parts.
The 30 EEA countries: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden. GOV.UK adds that if you live in the EEA or Switzerland and receive a UK State Pension, you will usually get an increase in your pension every year.
Countries and territories with a qualifying social security agreement: Barbados, Bermuda, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Gibraltar, Guernsey, Isle of Man, Israel, Jamaica, Jersey, Kosovo, Mauritius, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Philippines, Serbia, Turkey and the USA.
Switzerland sits alongside the EEA in the same guidance. That is the whole of the uprating list as GOV.UK publishes it. Anything absent from it is frozen.
GOV.UK does not publish a frozen list, because it does not need to: the rule is exclusive, so the frozen list is everything the uprating list leaves out. That is the method to use, and it is the method the table below applies. Where a country is not named in the EEA group, is not Gibraltar or Switzerland, and does not appear in the agreement group, the annual increase is not paid there.
The largest affected populations, by a wide margin, are in the Commonwealth. DWP's official statistics on uprating costs in frozen rate countries, published on 19 July 2023, record around 480,000 overseas State Pension recipients who do not get increases as at March 2022, and state that 84 per cent of them live in Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
The results surprise people in both directions, so here is the check against the GOV.UK list for the destinations expats ask about most:
| Country or territory | Annual increase paid? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| USA | Yes | Named in the agreement group |
| Philippines | Yes | Named in the agreement group |
| Turkey | Yes | Named in the agreement group |
| Israel | Yes | Named in the agreement group |
| Jamaica, Barbados, Bermuda | Yes | Named in the agreement group |
| Mauritius | Yes | Named in the agreement group |
| Gibraltar | Yes | Named alongside the EEA |
| Switzerland | Yes | Named alongside the EEA |
| Jersey, Guernsey, Isle of Man | Yes | Named in the agreement group |
| Spain, Portugal, France, Cyprus, Ireland | Yes | EEA |
| Canada | No | GOV.UK names it as excluded despite an agreement |
| New Zealand | No | GOV.UK names it as excluded despite an agreement |
| Australia | No | Not on the list |
| South Africa | No | Not on the list |
| Thailand | No | Not on the list |
| Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong | No | Not on the list |
| UAE and the wider Gulf | No | Not on the list |
| India, Pakistan, Bangladesh | No | Not on the list |
| Japan | No | Not on the list |
Two lines in that table do most of the damage. Canada and New Zealand both have social security agreements with the UK, and people reasonably assume an agreement means an increase. GOV.UK is explicit that it does not: "The UK has social security agreements with Canada and New Zealand, but you cannot get a yearly increase in your UK State Pension if you live in either of those countries."
Those agreements are not worthless, though. GOV.UK states that time spent living in Canada or New Zealand, and time spent living in Australia before 5 April 2001, can be added to the qualifying years in your UK National Insurance record. That route carries its own conditions, including that you are currently living in the EEA or Switzerland and are a UK, EEA or Swiss national, so check the GOV.UK page against your own position. Where it applies, it helps you reach entitlement. It does not uprate it.
The table above is derived rather than official: it applies the GOV.UK rule to the destinations we are asked about most, and it reflects the GOV.UK uprating list as checked on 5 August 2026. Because the list can be amended, check the GOV.UK page for your own country before you act on anything, including this article.
This is where the abstraction becomes a number. GOV.UK gives the full rate of new State Pension as £241.30 a week, which is £12,548 a year. Take that as a starting rate, hold it flat, and compare it with the same pension receiving an annual increase.
| Years drawing it abroad | Frozen income, every year | Uprated income in the final year (2.5%) | Cumulative shortfall at 2.5% | Cumulative shortfall at 4% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 years | £12,548 | £15,670 | £15,100 | £25,172 |
| 20 years | £12,548 | £20,059 | £69,572 | £122,691 |
| 25 years | £12,548 | £22,695 | £114,908 | £208,866 |
Uprating is applied from the second year in this model, so both start at the same figure. The percentages are assumptions, not forecasts: 2.5 per cent is the floor in the triple lock formula, and 4 per cent is closer to what several recent years have produced. Your own figure will differ, most obviously if you are on the basic State Pension rather than the new one, or if you have a partial record.
What the table shows is that the effect is not linear. Ten years of a freeze is an irritation. Twenty-five years of it, which is an entirely ordinary length of retirement for someone who moves abroad at 66, is a sum comparable to a house deposit, and it lands in exactly the later years when other income sources are usually thinnest.
Run it with your own weekly amount and time horizon in the frozen State Pension calculator, which uses the same method as the table above. If you are weighing up where to live, the cost of living comparison tool puts that shortfall next to what your money actually buys in each destination.
The most persistent misunderstanding about frozen pensions is that entitlement to the increase is earned. It is not. You could have worked in the UK for 40 years, paid the maximum in every one of them, and still be paid a frozen pension because you retired to Perth. Someone with a thinner record who retired to Portugal receives the increase every April.
The rule tracks residence, and it tracks it continuously. It is the country where you are living when the pension is paid, and where you continue to live, that decides the outcome.
Because of this, the choice of destination is a financial decision as well as a lifestyle one, and it is one of the very few retirement variables that remains entirely within your control right up to the moment you go. Two otherwise identical people, retiring on the same day with the same record, can be tens of thousands of pounds apart by their eighties on the basis of a single line on the GOV.UK list.
Because the test is residence, a move changes the answer. If you are living somewhere off the list and you move to a country on it, you come within the group GOV.UK describes as receiving the increase each year. A move in the other direction takes you out of it.
Changes of this kind need to reach the department that pays you. GOV.UK asks you to "Report changes (such as a change of address or bank details) to the International Pension Centre by phone or in writing", and specifically not by email. The International Pension Centre can also tell you what rate will apply to you in a given country before you commit to the move, which is worth doing while the decision is still open.
Yes, and this is the single most valuable sentence in the whole subject. GOV.UK states: "Your pension will go up to the current rate if you return to live in the UK."
That is the current rate, not the frozen one, and not a partial catch-up. Someone who has been paid £8,000 a year for fifteen years in a frozen country and then returns moves onto the rate everyone else is paid. There is no back payment for the years already received at the lower amount, but the income from the return date onwards is the full current figure.
GOV.UK sets out two practical steps on the same guidance: contact the Pension Service, for which "you need your return date and contact details, both abroad and in the UK", and call HM Revenue and Customs to tell them you are returning to the UK.
Yes, and there is a point here that most coverage of frozen pensions misses entirely. In a country on the uprating list, your starting rate is a starting point. In a frozen country, your starting rate is your permanent rate. Every qualifying year that does increase your entitlement is therefore worth more in a frozen country than in an uprated one, because it lifts the figure that then holds for the rest of your life. Not every year counts: if your record already reaches the full rate, or you were contracted out before April 2016, an extra year may add nothing. Your State Pension forecast at gov.uk/check-state-pension shows which years would count before you pay for any.
The route to adding years is voluntary National Insurance, and GOV.UK changed the rules for time abroad from the 2026 to 2027 tax year:
The current voluntary rates that applies to time abroad is Class 3, at £18.40 a week for the 2026 to 2027 tax year, or about £957 for a full year. The Class 2 rate of £3.65 a week still appears in the rates table but, per the change above, cannot be paid for time abroad. Our NI top-up illustrator shows what a year costs and what it adds, and the voluntary NI guide sets out the eligibility tests in full.
Deferral is the other lever, and it behaves differently abroad. GOV.UK guidance on deferring if you move abroad says the normal deferral rules apply if you move to the EEA, Switzerland, or a country the UK has a social security agreement with, again excluding Canada and New Zealand.
Move anywhere else and the extra payment you earn by deferring is itself frozen. GOV.UK: "the extra payment you get will stay the same. It will not go up or down over time." It is calculated on the State Pension you are entitled to at whichever is later of the date you reach State Pension age and the date you move abroad. GOV.UK directs anyone wanting their own figures to the International Pension Centre.
This matters for timing. Where you are living at the moment you reach State Pension age, and the order in which you move and claim, both feed into a number you will live with for decades. It is a genuinely technical question, and one worth putting to a regulated specialist alongside your private pensions rather than deciding on a hunch.
The freeze is not an administrative accident and it is not new. Uprating for people who are not ordinarily resident in Great Britain is switched off by regulation, under the heading "Application of disqualification in respect of up-rating of benefit" in regulation 5 of the Social Security (Persons Abroad) Regulations 1975. Reciprocal agreements are the mechanism that switches it back on, country by country, which is why the list looks the way it does rather than following any obvious geographic or Commonwealth logic.
Successive UK governments have maintained the policy on the basis that uprating abroad follows treaty obligations rather than applying universally, and campaign groups representing affected pensioners have contested it in Parliament and in the courts for decades. Plan around the rule as it stands today, and treat any future change as an upside you did not count on.
Three sources settle almost every question, and none of them cost anything:
If you have not yet traced all your UK pension entitlements, our guide on tracing UK pensions as an expat explains how to locate pensions from former employers and check your State Pension record. For anyone heading to one of the largest frozen destinations, our guide to transferring a UK pension to Australia covers the private pension side of the same move.
For most people the State Pension is the floor of retirement income rather than the whole of it, and a frozen floor changes what the rest of the structure has to do. It puts more weight on the parts of your income that can still grow: private and workplace pensions, invested capital, rental income, and the currency your costs are actually denominated in.
That is a solvable problem, and it is much easier to solve before you draw than after. The people who come out of this well are usually the ones who knew the number in advance, chose their destination with it in front of them, filled the gaps in their record while they still could, and built the rest of the plan around a State Pension they had already decided to treat as fixed.
If you would like to be introduced to a regulated specialist who works with UK expatriates on retirement income, including how claiming your UK State Pension abroad fits with your private pensions, your currency exposure and the tax position where you live, you can start your request. Pharos is an introducer, so there is no cost to ask and no obligation. We review every submission before any introduction is considered.
From 6 April 2026 you cannot pay voluntary Class 2 National Insurance for time abroad, and the Class 3 entry test rose from 3 years to 10. This guide covers the current rules, the CF83 application, the 2026/27 figures, and how to work out whether a year would add anything to your pension.
Expats often lose track of old UK pension pots after moving jobs or countries. How pension tracing works, how to find lost pensions from overseas, and next steps.
UK expats in Australia face strict HMRC ROPS rules, an age-55 condition, and Australian tax on the transfer. This guide explains the landscape neutrally.
A guide for UK nationals in Spain on sense-checking how retirement and investment money is being looked after, including fees, suitability, and review frequency.
OpenEstimate your UK pension pot value at retirement.
OpenEstimate a defined benefit transfer value and its drivers.
OpenYear-by-year income versus expenses projection.
OpenProject how a UK pension's IHT exposure grows to retirement under the April 2027 rules.
OpenSERPS ran from 1978 to 2002, and the earnings you built up under it did not disappear. This guide explains where it went, how to tell whether you were contracted out, and what it means for expatriates drawing a UK State Pension abroad.
OpenGood to know
GOV.UK applies a closed rule: your State Pension will only increase each year if you live in the European Economic Area, Gibraltar, Switzerland, or a country that has a social security agreement with the UK, and it names Canada and New Zealand as excluded despite having agreements. Every other country and territory therefore pays a frozen pension. That includes Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, Thailand, Singapore, the UAE, India, Japan and much of the Commonwealth, though Barbados, Bermuda, Jamaica, Mauritius, Cyprus and Malta do receive the increase. The only official list is the one of countries that do receive the annual increase, published on GOV.UK as 'Countries where we pay an annual increase in the State Pension'; the frozen list is what that list leaves out, and it can be amended, so check the GOV.UK page for your own country.
Australia does not appear on the GOV.UK list of countries where an annual increase is paid, and it is not in the EEA, Gibraltar or Switzerland, so a UK State Pension paid to a resident of Australia does not rise each April. GOV.UK also notes that only time spent living in Australia before 5 April 2001 can be added to the qualifying years on a UK National Insurance record, and that this route carries its own conditions.
Because uprating is a separate question from having an agreement. GOV.UK states plainly that the UK has social security agreements with Canada and New Zealand, but that you cannot get a yearly increase in your UK State Pension if you live in either of those countries. The agreements do other work: GOV.UK says time spent living in Canada or New Zealand can be added to the qualifying years in your UK National Insurance record, subject to conditions including that you are currently living in the EEA or Switzerland and are a UK, EEA or Swiss national.
Yes. GOV.UK says your pension will go up to the current rate if you return to live in the UK. There is no back payment for the years you were paid a frozen amount, but from your return the rate is the current one. GOV.UK asks you to contact the Pension Service with your return date and your contact details both abroad and in the UK, and to call HMRC to say you are returning.
Using the 2026/27 full new State Pension of £241.30 a week, or £12,548 a year, a pension that never rises falls behind one uprated at 2.5 per cent a year by about £69,600 over 20 years, and by about £122,700 if uprating averages 4 per cent. By year 20 the uprated pension is worth around £20,059 a year at 2.5 per cent against £12,548 frozen. Our frozen State Pension calculator lets you put your own weekly figure and time horizon in.
The triple lock is the commitment to uprate the basic and new State Pension every year by the highest of earnings growth, inflation or 2.5 per cent, as DWP describes it in its published benefit rate statistics. It only reaches pensions that qualify for uprating in the first place. If the country you live in is not on the GOV.UK list, the annual increase is not applied to your payment, whatever the triple lock produces that April.
Often yes, through voluntary National Insurance, and the rules changed for 2026/27. GOV.UK states that from the 2026 to 2027 tax year you cannot pay voluntary Class 2 National Insurance contributions for time abroad, and that Class 3 now requires you to have previously lived in the UK for 10 years in a row, or to have paid 10 years of qualifying contributions in total. Class 3 is £18.40 a week for 2026/27. Extra qualifying years raise your starting rate, and in a frozen country the starting rate is the rate you keep.
Uprating follows residence, so the answer turns on where you are living rather than where you built your record. GOV.UK asks you to report changes such as a change of address to the International Pension Centre by phone or in writing, and not by email, because those changes affect what you are paid. The International Pension Centre can confirm the rate that will apply to you before you move.
