Personal Pension Retirement Age Increases

In the past the previous chancellor, George Osborne, stated that the plan was for the earliest age that you could draw your benefits from your personal pension would be 10 years lower than the State pension age at that point in time.

However, the only legislation that is in force currently is to say that the minimum age for taking personal pension benefits is 55 and no further increases to the personal pension retirement ages have actually been set in stone.

But, that is not to say that this will not happen some time in the near future to keep personal pension retirement ages in line with those of the state pension (minus 10 years). In fact the Treasury has confirmed that it will push ahead with the changes to personal pension retirement ages and add them in to future legislation to keep them in line with state pension ages.

What this means in practice is that anyone who was born in 1971 may have the minimum age at which they can take their personal pension changed to 57. This is because the first date at which the State pension age changes to 67 is in 2028 and at that time, if they changed the personal pension age to 57, that would be for people who were born in 1971. So if you were born before 1971 then hopefully none of the changes will affect you.

So there is a group of people, if that is the case, whose state pension age is 67 but who may still be able to take their personal pension at age 55. These are the people who are born between 1961 and 1971.

However, as we say, all this is hypothetical until more legislation is enacted!