You must have 10 qualifying years on your national insurance record to receive the minimum UK state pension. If you want the full pension, which currently stands at £185.15 (€210.85) a week, you’ll need 35 years on your record.
However, even if you haven’t worked the required amount of time to reach the minimum 10 years, you can make voluntary contributions to increase your record, as long as you already have three years contributions. Having ten years on your record would entitle you to 10/35ths of the full pension, or £52.90 per week.
If you have enough years left until you retire to continue making voluntary contributions, you could reach the 35-year threshold and claim the full UK state pension. Combined with the full state Irish pension of €265.30 per week, you could be commanding €475.87 a week — or €24,745.24 a year (excluding double payments) – in state pensions alone.
“If you were a 66-year-old at the moment living in the UK and were trying to buy an annuity for life that would give you the equivalent of the UK pension, it would cost you at least £250,000 to buy that benefit,” Moore says. “But you’d be buying it for a fraction of the cost.”