Re: UK state pension and USA social security
 

Thank you for the confirmation.

Re: UK state pension and USA social security
 

Form SSA-308 is used to identify which years were from work and which were from voluntary contributions for foreign pensions. This is the form she was asked to complete after she begins receiving her SS which she applied for recently. The WEP reduction will then begin.

https://www.ssa.gov/forms/ssa-308.pdf

Re: UK state pension and USA social security
 

Thank you durham lad for that information. However, in my case the reduction for Voluntary Contributions I made to the UK State Pension in the WEP calculation makes no difference to the SS payment.

Re: UK state pension and USA social security
 

I have only just come across this thread:
I am currently taking SS at 65 and I am eligible for my UK pension next year.
If I were to suspend my SS until age 70 and claim my UK pension at age 66 would this mean I would not pay WEP until age 70?

Re: UK state pension and USA social security
 

Yes, I would think so.

Re: UK state pension and USA social security
 

Unless you want to pay back all that you've so far received in SS (I presume you must have taken it early if you are currently 65) you would need to wait until your full SS retirement age (66 years and 2 or 4 months?) to suspend and then subsequently start UK State Pension.

Re: UK state pension and USA social security
 

If I contributed to UK pension while living in the UK for a few years, then moved to the US and started making voluntary contributions, how do I know which part of my UK pension is based on earned income (and subject to WEP) and which part isn't?

Re: UK state pension and USA social security
 

The part related to employment would, and the part related to your voluntary contributions would not.

Re: UK state pension and USA social security
 

When you log onto your HMRC account online to check your NI contributions record it is clear which years are voluntary.

Re: UK state pension and USA social security
 

Where should I be looking: I see two areas of interest;
View your state pension forecast
and
View your National Insurance Record

The latter seems appropriate. When I follow that link, I'm given a list of years, with only 'Full Year' or 'Year is not full' presented, and a 'view details' option.
'View details' opens a few more lines that say (eg)
'You have contributions from Self-employment: 53 weeks' (these were actually the 'voluntary payments' I made)
OR,
'you have contributions from paid employment' (these were for actual work-years)
OR,
'You have contributions from National Insurance credits: 50 weeks. These may have been added to your record if you were ill/disabled, unemployed, caring for someone full-time or on jury service.' (these were actually from when I was a student in the 70s).
Plus I have some 'year is not full' entries that have basically combinations of the above.

SO ... I guess the 'voluntary payments' are those indicated as 'Self-employment'.

For me, since I've got more than 30 years of US SS payments, I am not affected by WEP so the above is academic, but I wanted to understand anyway!

Interestingly, the record for 2020-21 is not available yet!

Re: UK state pension and USA social security
 

My record is very clear as I was never self employed.

”2019-20 Full year
You have contributions from
Voluntary: 52 weeks”

Re: UK state pension and USA social security
 

All of my voluntary years are shown as “Self Employment” and several others confirmed that was the case for them as well. The thing we all had in common was that we were paying Class 2 rates for voluntary contributions, even though we were fully employed in the USA. I came to the conclusion that Class 3 rates are recoded as voluntary, and class 2 rates as self employed.

Re: UK state pension and USA social security
 

Wow; I was never self-employed either; I was always full-time employed in UK, and then always full-time employed in US, but as you can see, my record says 'self-employment' ! I wonder if it's related to when you applied for class 2 contributions? I applied only last year; maybe that's when they designated me as self-employed. Maybe you applied a long time ago when things were different? But regardless - interesting differences!

​​​​​​​Same for me.

Re: UK state pension and USA social security
 

I have been paying voluntary Class 2 since 1996, and they are all classified as Self Employment..

Re: UK state pension and USA social security
 

The voluntary payments I made were Class 3 after I had retired so that is the difference. Hopefully the timing will be acceptable to SSA, in that the years listed as self employment match years in the SS record where you also paid FICA.