Right now, thousands of pensioners across the UK are about to receive two separate payments directly from the DWP, and most of them have absolutely no idea it’s coming.
We’re talking about a payment of over £2,000 landing in 1 month, followed by an additional £800 on top of that, both in June 2026.
But, here’s the part that should really grab your attention.
A large number of people who are fully entitled to this money will never see a single penny of it.
Not because the government took it away, but because they didn’t know they were eligible.
They didn’t check.
They didn’t act.
And by the time they found out, it was too late.
If you or someone you love is over state pension age or approaching it, you need to watch every single second of this video.
Because what I’m about to share could put over £2,800 back in your pocket.
Money that the DWP is legally obligated to pay, but won’t chase you down to make sure you’ve claimed.
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Now, I need you to stay with me for the full video.
I know that sounds like something everyone says, but I mean it this time.
The details here matter enormously.
The eligibility rules around these payments are specific.
If you switch off 5 minutes early, you might think you don’t qualify when actually you do.
Or worse, you might think you’re fine when there’s something you still need to do.
And if you’ve got a parent, a grandparent, a neighbor, or a friend who’s retired or close to retirement, please share this video with them.
You could genuinely be putting money in their hands that they didn’t know existed.
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Now, let’s get straight into it.
June 2026, mark it in your diary, because for a significant number of pensioners and older benefit claimants in the UK, this month represents one of the most financially important moments in recent memory.
Two separate payments, both from the DWP, both landing within the same period, and together, they add up to a figure that could genuinely change someone’s financial situation, particularly for those who are struggling with the cost of living, who are managing on a fixed income, or who have been quietly underpaid for months or even years without knowing it.
Let me
break down exactly what’s happening, because there are two distinct elements here, and it’s important you understand both of them clearly.
The first part of this is something that’s been building for a while now, and it involves the state pension itself.
You might already be aware that the state pension has been subject to what’s called the triple lock, a government commitment that the pension rises each year by whichever is highest out of three measures: inflation, average earnings growth, or 2 and 1/2%.
Now, what most people don’t realize is what happens when that triple lock calculation results in a significant jump.
And what it means not just for your ongoing weekly payment, but for any period where your pension was calculated incorrectly, underpaid, or where arrears have accumulated.
The DWP has been running one of the largest pension underpayment correction exercises in its history.
This started several years ago, but it is still very much ongoing.
And what that means in practical terms is this.
Thousands of people, particularly women, widows, divorced or seas, and those who took time out of work have been receiving less state pension than they were legally entitled to.
Not by a small amount.
In some cases, by tens of pounds a week.
And when that’s multiplied out over months and years, it adds up to thousands of pounds.
If you fall into one of those categories, and I’m going to go through the specific groups in just a moment, then you could be due a lump sum correction payment that, depending on how long the underpayment went on, could easily be in the region of 2,000 pounds or more.
Some people have received significantly higher than that.
The DWP has paid out over 500 million pounds in corrections already, but the scheme is not finished.
There are still people waiting, and there are still people who don’t even know they should be waiting.
Here’s where it gets serious.
The DWP is not proactively contacting everyone who may be owed money at the same time.
They’re working through cases gradually, which means if you don’t know to check, if you don’t know you could be owed, you might simply be left waiting indefinitely.
Or worse, your case might be overlooked entirely if you don’t prompt it.
So, who exactly is at risk of having been underpaid? Let’s go through the main groups, because this is crucial.
The first group is married women and widows.
For decades, the state pension rules said that a woman who hadn’t built up enough national insurance contributions of her own could claim a pension based on her husband’s record worth 60% of the basic state pension.
This was called the category B pension, but the system that was supposed to automatically upgrade women’s pensions when their husbands retired or when they became widowed, often failed to do so.
Women were simply left on a lower rate with no explanation and no notification.
If you’re a woman who reached state pension age before April 2016 and you were or have been married, this could apply directly to you.
The second group is widows and widowers.
When a spouse passes away, the surviving partner is often entitled to inherit a portion of their deceased spouse’s additional state pension, the earnings related top-up that many people built up over their working lives.
Again, the system was supposed to handle this automatically.
Again, it frequently didn’t.
People were left grieving and on top of that, quietly receiving less than they were owed.
If you’ve been widowed at any point since reaching pension age, please take note.
The third group is people over 80.
There’s a provision called the category D pension, which entitles people aged 80 or over who don’t have a full pension to receive a minimum level of state pension regardless of their national insurance history.
Some people in this group have never been moved onto the correct rate.
If you know someone in their 80s who doesn’t seem to be receiving much from the state pension, this is worth investigating urgently.
The fourth group, and this one is often overlooked, is people who were at some point on a means-tested benefit like income support and who had a period where their home responsibilities protection should have been applied to boost their national insurance record, but wasn’t.
Home responsibilities protection was a scheme that ran from 1978 to 2010 to protect the pension rights of people who stayed home to care for children or ill relatives, but the records weren’t always transferred correctly, and some people’s pension calculations reflect a gap that
shouldn’t exist.
You might be thinking, surely the DWP would have sorted all of this out by now.
And the honest answer is, no, they haven’t.
The scale of the problem is enormous, and while they are making corrections, they are not doing it all at once, and they are certainly not being as proactive as many campaigners would like.
Now, let’s talk about the second payment, the £800, because this one is slightly different in nature, and it affects a different but overlapping group of people.
This payment relates to the pension credit uplift and associated cost of living support that the government has confirmed is being structured into the June payment schedule for 2026.
Now, pension credit is something I want to spend a good amount of time on, because the statistics around it are genuinely shocking.
It is estimated that somewhere in the region of 800,000 to 1 million eligible households in the UK are not claiming pension credit right now.
Not because they’re not entitled to it, but because they don’t know it exists.
They think they won’t qualify, or they find the application process too confusing or too daunting.
And that is an absolute travesty, because pension credit isn’t just a small top-up.
It is a gateway benefit, meaning that once you’re receiving it, a whole cascade of other entitlements open up to you, including free TV licenses for those over 75, help with NHS costs like dental treatment and glasses, additional housing benefit, council tax reduction, and various seasonal payments.
So, what
is pension credit exactly? It comes in two parts.
The first part is called guarantee credit.
This tops up your weekly income to a minimum guaranteed level set by the government.
For a single person in 2025 and 2026, that minimum is around 218 pounds per week.
For a couple, it’s higher, around 332 pounds per week.
If your income from state pension, private pensions, savings, or other sources falls below those figures, guarantee credit makes up the difference.
So, if you’re a single pensioner receiving, say, 180 pounds a week in total, pension credit would top you up by around 38 pounds per week.
Over the course of a year, that’s nearly 2,000 pounds on top of everything else it unlocks.
The second part is called savings credit.
This is available to people who reach state pension age before April 2016 and who have saved a modest amount for retirement.
It essentially gives you a small financial reward for having saved, even if those savings aren’t large.
Now, the reason the figure of 800 pounds is particularly relevant here is the additional payments that are linked to pension credit receipt in the June 2026 payment cycle.
The DWP has structured payments so that those on pension credit, or those who are newly confirmed as eligible, receive additional support amounts as part of the broader benefit payment schedule for this period.
And for those who have been under claiming, or who have only recently been confirmed as eligible, this can represent a payment that arrives as a combined or catch-up amount, bringing the total to around 800 pounds or more in that payment window.
This is the money that hundreds of thousands of people are simply leaving on the table.
Here’s where it gets really important.
And I want you to pay very close attention here.
You might be thinking that you’re just over the threshold.
You might be thinking, “I’ve got a small private pension, so I won’t qualify.
” Or, “I’ve got a few thousand in savings, so pension credit won’t apply to me.
” And I’m telling you right now, do not assume.
Do not talk yourself out of checking.
The eligibility rules for pension credit are more flexible than most people realize.
For instance, having savings or capital doesn’t automatically disqualify you, though it does affect the calculation.
If you have savings under £10,000, they aren’t counted at all for the guarantee credit calculation.
Above that, the DWP uses what’s called a tariff income assumption.
But even this doesn’t necessarily push you out of eligibility.
There are also additional amounts within pension credit for people who are disabled, for carers, and for those with certain housing costs.
The key point is this.
The only way to know for certain whether you qualify is to check.
And the cost of not checking, if you turn out to be eligible, could be thousands of pounds a year in ongoing payments, plus potentially years of backdated amounts.
Pension credit can be backdated by up to 3 months when you claim.
3 months, which means if you’re eligible right now and you wait another 3 months before applying, you will have lost 3 months worth of payments forever.
That money is gone.
You can’t reclaim it beyond the 3-month backdating window.
Think about what 3 months of pension credit looks like.
If you’re entitled to even £50 per week top-up, which is a fairly modest figure, that’s £650 gone.
Just because you didn’t make the call.
Now, let me talk about the practical side of all of this.
Because knowing you might be owed money is one thing.
Actually claiming it is another.
And I don’t want you to walk away from this video feeling informed but overwhelmed.
So, let me give you the actual steps you need to take.
Step one.
If you think you might be affected by the state pension underpayment issue, if you’re a woman who reached pension age before 2016, a widow or widower, or someone over 80, the first thing you should do is contact the Pension Service directly.
The number for the Pension Service in the UK is 0800 731 0469.
This is a free number.
Write it down.
You can call them and ask them to review your state pension entitlement.
You can ask them specifically whether your record has been reviewed as part of the underpayment correction exercise.
Be persistent.
Be clear.
Ask them to put anything in writing.
Step two.
If you’re already receiving a state pension and you haven’t had any letter from the DWP about a review or correction in the past year, that does not necessarily mean you’re not owed money.
It could simply mean your case hasn’t been processed yet.
You are within your rights to proactively request a review.
Step three.
For pension credit, go to the government’s official website at gov.
uk and use the Pension Credit Calculator.
It takes about 10 minutes.
You enter your income, your savings, your housing costs, and it gives you an instant indication of whether you might be eligible.
Even if the result suggests you might not qualify, I would still recommend making a call to the Pension Credit Claim Line on 0800 991234 and speaking to an advisor.
They can factor in things the online calculator might not account for, such as disability premiums or carer additions.
Step four.
If you have a family member who you think might be eligible for any of this, particularly an elderly relative who doesn’t use the internet or who finds these things confusing, please help them through this process.
Make the call with them.
Sit with them while they use the calculator.
This information is all completely free to access, and there are also charities like Age UK and Citizens Advice that can help navigate the application process at no cost.
Step five.
Keep a record of everything.
When you make a call, write down the date, the time, the name of the advisor you spoke to if possible, and a summary of what was said.
If you’re told your case is being reviewed, ask for a timeline.
If that timeline passes without any update, follow up.
The DWP system is overstretched, and unfortunately, the squeaky wheel often gets the grease.
Now, I want to take a moment to talk about something that I think is deeply unfair, because I think you deserve to hear it stated plainly.
The people most likely to miss out on these payments are often the most vulnerable.
They’re the people who don’t spend time online researching their entitlements.
They’re the people who assume the government would tell them if they were owed something.
They’re the people who feel intimidated by official systems, or who don’t want to make a fuss, or who simply don’t believe they deserve to ask for more.
And the system, whether intentionally or not, benefits from that passivity.
Unclaimed benefits save the government money in the short term.
The DWP’s budget for paying out corrections and backdated amounts is significant, but every person who doesn’t claim is a line item that disappears from the balance sheet.
That is not right, and it is not the way things should work.
These payments are not charity.
They are not handouts.
They are entitlements.
They are payments that have been earned through years of national insurance contributions, through caring for families, through the taxes paid over a lifetime of work.
And every single person who is entitled to them deserves to receive them.
That’s why I’m asking you, genuinely asking you, to take this seriously, not just for yourself, but for the people in your life who might not have access to this information.
Your mom, your dad, your gran, your neighbor who lives alone and never seems to have quite enough at the end of the month.
Let me add some more context on just how significant the underpayment situation is, because I think it helps to understand the scale of what we’re talking about here.
The DWP began its state pension underpayment exercise following an internal audit that revealed systematic errors going back decades.
By early 2025, the DWP had already identified and corrected cases involving hundreds of thousands of individuals.
The average correction payment had been running at around £9,000 per person, though this figure varies enormously depending on how long the underpayment went on.
£9,000 that’s the average, not the maximum.
The average.
Some women who had been underpaid for many years received corrections in excess of £20,000.
Others, where the underpayment period was shorter, received smaller but still significant sums in the hundreds to low thousands.
The DWP has publicly committed to completing the review of all affected cases, but completing the review and making sure every person receives what they’re owed are two different things.
There have been reports of delay of cases being marked as resolved when they haven’t been, and of people receiving letters that don’t accurately reflect their full entitlement.
This is why checking is so important.
This is why you cannot simply assume that if you were owed something, someone would have told you.
There’s another angle to this that I want to cover before we wrap up, and this concerns people who are in their late 50s or early 60s approaching state pension age rather than already receiving it.
If you’re in this group, now is the time to check your state pension forecast.
You can do this online through the government gateway.
Go to gov.
uk and search for check your state pension.
You’ll need to log in or create a government gateway account, but the process is straightforward.
Your forecast will show you how much state pension you’re on track to receive, and crucially, whether there are any gaps in your national insurance record that are reducing that amount.
Here’s the important bit.
For many people, those gaps can be filled.
You can make voluntary national insurance contributions to plug gaps in your record.
And for some people, this can add pounds to their weekly state pension that will pay for itself many times over across the course of a retirement.
But, and this is critical, the rules around voluntary contributions have been changing.
The government has extended certain deadlines in the past, but those deadlines are not infinite.
If you have gaps in your national insurance record from before April 2006, the window to fill those gaps has already closed.
For more recent gaps, the deadline to make voluntary contributions may also have specific cutoff dates.
So, if you’ve been thinking about this, now is not the time to put it off.
Get your forecast, check your record, and if there are gaps, find out quickly whether you can still fill them.
Let me also quickly mention one more area of potential support that often gets missed.
And that’s the winter fuel payment situation.
As many of you will know, the eligibility criteria for the winter fuel payment changed in recent years.
It was previously a universal payment for everyone over the qualifying age, but it was restricted so that only those receiving certain means-tested benefits, including pension credit, would continue to receive it.
This is yet another reason why claiming pension credit matters so much because if you’re entitled to pension credit but haven’t claimed it, you may also have lost access to the winter fuel payment as a result.
Depending on your circumstances,
that could mean a loss of between 150 and 300 pounds per year, year after year, until the situation is corrected.
The interaction between pension credit and winter fuel payment eligibility is one of the most concrete examples of why getting your entitlements right has a ripple effect across multiple areas of your finances.
It’s not just one payment.
It’s a chain of support, each link connected to the one before it.
Now, you might also be wondering whether any of this requires you to get professional advice or pay for a service.
And I want to be very clear about this because there are unfortunately some organizations that will charge people to help them claim benefits they’re entitled to for free.
You should never have to pay to claim pension credit.
You should never have to pay to request a state pension review.
The official government services are free.
Age UK offers free advice and support for older people navigating the benefit system.
Citizens Advice also provides completely free guidance on benefits, pensions, and DWP processes.
If anyone ever asks you to pay a fee to access your state pension entitlement or to make a pension credit application, walk away.
That is not a legitimate service.
The information and the systems to claim are all available for free.
What’s needed is not money.
It’s knowledge and the confidence to act on it.
And that’s exactly what this video is here to give you.
So, let’s bring it all together.
Here’s the summary of what you need to know and what you need to do.
In June 2026, there are two significant payments that eligible pensioners stand to receive from the DWP.
The first is the state pension correction payment, which for those who have been identified as having been underpaid could represent a lump sum of £2,000 more or in some cases significantly more depending on the duration and extent of the underpayment.
This affects in particular married women and widows who reached pension age before 2016.
Widows and widowers who may not have had additional state pension entitlement transferred correctly and people over 80 who may not be receiving the correct rate.
The second is the pension credit linked payment.
The additional support of around £800 that flows through to those who are confirmed as eligible in the June payment cycle.
This is a payment that over a million people are currently missing out on simply because they haven’t applied for pension credit, a benefit they are legally entitled to claim.
Together, these two elements represent a combined total of over 2,800 for those who qualify for both, and they are available right now to real people in real circumstances who are being systematically underserved by a system that should be ensuring they receive every penny they’re owed.
The actions you need to take are clear.
Call the pension service if you think you might have been underpaid.
Use the pension credit calculator at gov.
uk and call the claim line if there’s any chance you might be eligible.
Check your state pension forecast if you’re approaching retirement age.
Help the people in your life to do the same, and don’t pay anyone to do any of this for you.
