State Pension Amounts for Every Year Since 2010

Key takeaways

• The full new State Pension is £241.30 a week in 2026/27, up from £155.65 when it started in April 2016. The full basic pension is £184.90.
• Across the 16 up-ratings from April 2011 to April 2026, earnings growth set the rise six times, prices six times and the 2.5% floor four times.
• Flat 2.5% rises every year since April 2016 would have left the new State Pension at £199.25 a week, £42.05 under the £241.30 now paid.
• The 34.37% cash rise since April 2021 is roughly 4.1% once prices are taken out, because CPI rose 29.1% across the same five years.
• At £241.30 a week the new State Pension sits just £3.30 above the £238.00 Pension Credit single guarantee for 2026/27.

State pension amounts for every year since April 2010

If you want the number, here it is. The state pension amounts for 2026/27 are £241.30 a week at the full new rate, which is £12,547.60 a year, and £184.90 a week for the full basic pension, which is £9,614.80 a year. The basic rate is the one paid to people who reached State Pension age before 6 April 2016. Both went up by 4.8% in April 2026.

State pension amounts are set once a year by statutory instrument, and every figure below is a full rate. Nobody is paid a percentage; the percentages decide what the cash becomes.

Those two figures are set in the Social Security Benefits Up-rating Order 2026, which does the job in the plainest possible language: for the basic pension it says that for "£176.45" substitute "£184.90", and for the new State Pension that for "£230.25" substitute "£241.30".

The table below is the whole record. Weekly rates at each April up-rating, the percentage rise, and which of the three triple lock measures produced it. The basic pension column runs from April 2010, the year before the triple lock started. The new State Pension column starts in April 2016, when it opened to people reaching State Pension age from 6 April that year.

The rates and the percentage rises come from the Department for Work and Pensions, in the data tables published with its Abstract of DWP benefit rate statistics 2025 on 28 January 2026, and from the 2026/27 rates schedule. The "what set the rise" column is DWP's own, from Table 1 of that abstract.

Which measure won, and how often

The triple lock sounds like one rule. It's three, and only the largest one pays. The Government Actuary's report on the 2026 order puts it exactly: "Triple Lock increases are determined as the highest of the annual growth in average May-July earnings (AWE), September prices (CPI) and 2.5%."

Across the 16 up-ratings from April 2011 to April 2026, the split is almost even. Prices won six times, earnings growth six times, and the 2.5% floor four times. The chart above plots the percentage applied at each April, and the shape of it is the point: a long flat stretch in the 2.5% to 3.9% band, then the 10.1% of April 2023 and the 8.5% of April 2024 standing well clear of everything either side.

Those two years did an unusual amount of the work. They moved the basic pension from £141.85 to £169.50 a week in 24 months, which is more cash than the eight years from April 2011 to April 2019 added between them.

The 2.5% floor mattered less than it looks

The floor is the part of the triple lock people argue about, so it's worth measuring. Take the new State Pension at its April 2016 starting rate of £155.65 and raise it by exactly 2.5% at each of the ten up-ratings since. You land at £199.25 a week. The actual rate is £241.30, so the two higher legs of the lock are worth £42.05 a week, about 21% more than the floor alone would have delivered.

The basic pension tells the same story over a longer run. From £97.65 in April 2010, sixteen 2.5% rises would reach £144.96. It's actually £184.90, a gap of £39.94 a week.

So the floor is not what drove the record. It bound in four of the sixteen years. Its real function showed up once, in April 2021, and that needed an Act of Parliament.

Two years when Parliament changed the formula

The triple lock is not self-executing. Section 150A of the Social Security Administration Act 1992 requires a review against earnings, and it stops the Secretary of State laying an up-rating order when earnings growth is negative. For the May to July 2020 window used in the April 2021 review, earnings fell 1.0%. On the statute as it stood, pensions could have been frozen.

So the formula was changed. DWP puts it like this: "The Social Security (Up-rating of Benefits) Act 2020 ensured when earnings were negative, that people claiming the State Pension saw an increase of 2.5%." That's the April 2021 row in the table.

The following year it was changed again, in the other direction. The Social Security (Up-rating of Benefits) Act 2021 required the April 2022 review to be done "by reference to the general level of prices obtaining in Great Britain (instead of the general level of earnings obtaining in Great Britain)", with a 2.5% floor retained. Measured earnings growth for that window came out at 8.6%. Prices to September 2021 were 3.1%, and 3.1% is what was paid. DWP files the whole episode under its coronavirus heading, which is where the distortion in the earnings figure came from.

That single suspension is still in the figures. Had 8.6% been applied in April 2022 and every later up-rating run as it did, the new State Pension would now be about £254.19 a week rather than £241.30, roughly £12.89 a week or £670.28 a year higher. The counterfactual is arithmetic, not a forecast, and it assumes the later percentages would have been identical.

What the cash rises bought after inflation

Cash records flatter. The Government Actuary's table shows £100 of State Pension in April 2021 becoming £134.37 by April 2026, a 34.37% rise in five years. Over the same five Aprils the CPI index moved from 110.1 to 142.1, which is 29.1%. The real gain is about 4.1%.

Stretch the window and the picture improves, but not dramatically. The new State Pension rose 55.0% between April 2016 and April 2026, against CPI inflation of 41.8%, so roughly 9.3% in real terms over a decade. The basic pension rose 89.3% from April 2010 to April 2026, against 59.3% on CPI, which is about 18.9% real across sixteen years.

DWP measures the same thing a third way, against pay. On its figures the basic pension was 19.6% of median weekly earnings in April 2010 and 23.0% in April 2025. Over those fifteen years the ratio moved by 3.4 percentage points.

The earnings input is not one number

Here's where a reference table gets uncomfortable. "Earnings growth" is not a single published figure, and the one that gets used is locked at a first estimate.

The April 2026 rise of 4.8% came from average weekly earnings for May to July 2025. In the ONS labour market release of 16 September 2025, annual growth for that quarter was 4.8% for regular earnings excluding bonuses and 4.7% for total earnings including bonuses. DWP's own abstract names its earnings column as series KAC3, total pay excluding arrears. On the current vintage of that series, the three months to July 2025 read 4.9%.

The same series has moved under earlier years too. April 2025's up-rating used 4.1%; KAC3 for the three months to July 2024 now reads 4.4%. Nothing is recalculated when that happens. The order is laid, the rate is paid, and the input is revised afterwards. For the April 2026 up-rating the 0.1 percentage point difference between 4.8% and 4.9% is about £0.23 a week on the new State Pension.

The price leg is tidier. ONS reported it once and plainly: "The Consumer Prices Index (CPI) rose by 3.8% in the 12 months to September 2025, unchanged from August." That 3.8% is the CPI figure in the Government Actuary's table for April 2026, and it lost to 4.8%.

Why your own amount is probably not the headline figure

The state pension amounts in the table are full rates. Plenty of people get less, and some get more. GOV.UK is direct about it: "If your National Insurance record started after April 2016 you will need 35 qualifying years to get the full rate of new State Pension", and anyone who was contracted out usually needs more than 35. The 2026/27 rates schedule also carries a transitional up-rating of 4.7991% for people below the full rate, and 3.80% for protected payments, so two pensioners can both have had a 2026 rise and have had different percentages.

The level also sits close to the means-tested floor. The Pension Credit standard minimum guarantee for a single person is £238.00 a week in 2026/27, against the full new State Pension of £241.30. That £3.30 gap is the margin by which a full new State Pension clears the safety net it was designed to sit above. For anyone working out how much they need to retire in the UK, the £12,547.60 a year is the floor to build on, not the plan. Pension Credit opens a separate door of its own: it is one of the four benefits behind warm home discount eligibility, which takes £150 off the electricity bill. Where a full record still leaves someone just under the £238 guarantee, pension credit backdating adds up to three months of that top-up to the first payment.

The strongest case against reading the record this way

A critic would say the comparison with a flat 2.5% is rigged. Of course the triple lock beat a 2.5% rule: it contains a 2.5% rule and two other measures, and the maximum of three numbers cannot be lower than one of them. The honest test is against a single-measure rule, and against CPI alone the basic pension since April 2010 is ahead by about 18.9% in real terms, which is a smaller claim than the 89.3% cash figure implies.

Two further objections hold. The first is the base. April 2010's £97.65 was 19.6% of median earnings, which is a low starting point: the earnings link was broken in 1982 and the basic pension then ran on RPI right up to September 2010. A formula that lifts the ratio to 23.0% is recovering ground rather than breaking new. The second is that the record is dominated by one inflation episode. Strip out April 2023 and April 2024 and the remaining 14 up-ratings average 3.35%.

There's also a cohort the headline figures don't describe. The new State Pension replaced a two-part system, and someone who reached State Pension age before 6 April 2016 can hold additional pension on top of the £184.90 basic rate. Additional pension and protected payments were uprated by 3.80% in April 2026, not 4.8%, and 3.80% is the September 2025 CPI figure rather than the triple lock outcome. For those households the "4.8% rise" in the press release describes only part of the payment. A smaller December payment sits outside the uprating altogether: the state pension Christmas Bonus has been £10 since 1972, which is 4.1% of a week at the 2026/27 full rate.

What this record cannot tell you

It can't tell you what you personally receive. Every figure here is a full rate or a statutory percentage, and your own amount depends on a National Insurance record this page has no sight of.

It can't be read as a trend either. The sample is sixteen up-ratings, of which one was changed by statute in each of two consecutive years and two sit inside a price shock with no precedent in the series. Nine of the sixteen rises land between 2.5% and 3.1%, which looks like a stable regime until the two that don't are included.

The real-terms figures also depend on which index you pick and which month you anchor to. The numbers above use CPI at April, because that's when the rate changes. DWP publishes the same comparison on RPI, and RPI has run higher than CPI in most of these years, so an RPI-deflated version of this table shows smaller real gains throughout. Neither version is wrong. They answer slightly different questions.

What would change the shape of this table

Three things would, and only one of them is in the news.

The first is the earnings leg losing to prices for a run of years. The Government Actuary's principal projection assumes the triple lock applies in every year to April 2030, with earnings ahead of CPI in the near term. A reversal of that ordering is what turns a 4.8% year into a 2.5% year, and the state pension increase for April 2027 turns on the May to July 2026 earnings figure against September 2026 CPI, which is not published as this is written. It has since printed at 3.5%, and the benefit uprating for April 2027 runs on that figure for everything outside the triple lock.

The second is another statutory override. It has happened twice in six years, and on both occasions the published formula was not what determined the rate.

The third is quieter and matters more over a decade. The full new State Pension of £241.30 is £3.30 above the Pension Credit guarantee of £238.00. Pension Credit has to rise at least with earnings by law, while the triple lock takes the highest of three. If the gap closes, the argument stops being about up-rating percentages and becomes about whether a full contribution record buys anything a means test wouldn't have provided anyway. That is the number worth watching in next April's rates schedule, and it is one line in a table that nobody reads.