plasticbag_uk

I am sure a lot of you have had emails and other spam sent to you offering help getting your UK pensions or transferring funds from the UK. You don't need help from any of these organisations. I have transferred funds and other money from the UK to our bank account here with no problems and no help from some commission grabbing scam artist. A pension firm you are with in the UK will transfer whatever you are owed with no trouble if requested, you will obviously pay a small transfer charge in some cases plus the exchange rate fee's. In my couple of cases I received every penny of my funds after contacting the Prudential company who asked for 4 forms of ID by mail and returning the forms they sent to me. In the case of my old employers it was even easier as we did the whole transaction by email with no costs, in fact once the whole thing was set the funds were transferred to my bank account 4 days later with no commission to some greedy agency. The Prudential I admit sent the funds by cheque and it took 3 weeks to clear with my bank charging me for the service.
As for your UK state pension, just go on line to 'myukpension.co.uk', enter your national insurance number and you will be told exactly how much you are entitled to and when to claim it. In order to get the full amount you must have worked in the UK for at least 30 years.
I hope this is helpful, I see many questions asked about this subject on other sites. I also receive spam concerning the subject.... Don't get scammed.

MidAtlantic

You seem to be merging a number of issues.

Transferring pensions - you cannot transfer a UK pension to a US pension. Agreed, there are scammers in this field.

Transfer of funds , whether liquidated pensions or other funds. There are many money transfer specialists, except for large sums, that provide a far more cost effective service than the main line banks.

Not all UK pension providers will make payment to a US bank account. Without a UK bank account that can cause problems, although the recently introduced Transferwise Borderless account looks like it could be a solution.

myukpension.co.uk does not exist. The only genuine source of personalized UK state pension information is the gov.uk International Pension Centre.

Nutmegger

So true -- never look for state pension info on any site that doesn't have a "gov" in the address!

celticgrid

To add another correction to the initial post...

You don't have to have "worked in the UK" for a number of years, you need to have a certain number of years of counted NI contributions.

(Not all years count if you were at any time contracted out so you can have, say, 40 years of contributions with only 28 counting towards your pension.)

And the minimum number of years for a full pension is now 35, not 30.