Which national pension authorities have answered our questions?

We write to most pension authorities in the countries we cover, stay in contact with them and update our facts as they answer. Read their written answers. Each country on our world map has one row on the index, with the institution we asked, the date we asked and its status as of 16 October 2026. Sources: our record of letters sent, dated 14 August 2026 to 8 September 2026, and official contact pages read 13 October 2026 and 14 October 2026. The full list is our authority answers index.

What are we asking?

We are putting the same 10 questions, in the same words, to the national pension institution of every country on the map, the countries we research and the ones we have mapped. The first five are the questions of our reachability study, so an answer already given counts.

1. How may a former member now living abroad contact you, in writing, from outside the country?
2. Can that person establish their identity to you without a national digital identity credential, and if not what is the alternative?
3. Can an application be completed in full without the person physically appearing in the country?
4. Where a member has died abroad, what is the route for their heirs and what documents are required?
5. Is there any register, statement or service through which a person may discover an entitlement they have forgotten?
6. Do you count or publish figures on entitlements that remain unpaid, or on members you can no longer reach, and if so where?
7. How may a former member living abroad obtain a statement of the insurance periods or contributions you hold for them?
8. How are periods of work or insurance completed in other countries taken into account, and under which agreements?
9. May a relative or another authorised person make a request for the member, and what do you require from them?
10. We will publish your answer on our answers page, naming your institution as the source and stating the date of your reply. If anything in it is wrong or incomplete, tell us and we will correct it in public, in full, beside the original. May we publish it on those terms?

Who do we ask?

For a mapped country, the institution that pays the contributory old age pension, as named on its own official pages. For a country we research, the institution our reachability study wrote to, unless our record shows another body is the one to ask. Each letter cites the institution's official contact page and the date we read it. Where we could not read one, we name the country: Australia, Chile, Honduras, India, Malaysia, Netherlands, Oman, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Spain. We say so in the letter rather than use an address we have not read.

What does each status mean?

• Answered: our answers page publishes at least one answer from an institution in the country.
• Replied: our latest letter has a dated reply and nothing is published yet. A reply is not always an answer.
• Asked on a date, no answer yet: our latest letter went out on the date shown and no answer is on our record. The wording stays the same however much time has passed.
• Asked, answer not published: the institution has not cleared its answer for publication.
• Not yet asked: no dated letter is on our record. We never mark a country asked without a date.

Countries are listed in alphabetical order. We do not rank institutions.

Our free connector reads the same record, so when you ask your assistant what an institution has told us, it says when we asked and that no answer is published yet, where that is the case.

Is this the same as the scoreboard?

No. The authority answers scoreboard is the view of our reachability study: who we wrote to and when each replied. The index covers every country on our world map and follows the ten questions.

We identify and research. Nothing here is advice or a statement about any person's entitlement.

Sources

• Our record of letters sent, from the reachability study, letters dated 14 August 2026 to 8 September 2026; statuses as of 16 October 2026.
• The answers published on our answers page, each with the institution named as the source and the date of the reply.
• Official contact pages of the institutions of the countries we have mapped, read 13 October 2026, and of the countries we research, read 14 October 2026.