United Kingdom → Germany
Pensions accrued in United Kingdom and Germany are administered separately by each country's providers and registers. We do the identification work in both jurisdictions, the route is different in each, and we use the verified route per country.
Find my pensionsFull refund if we find nothing material.
Every line below is drawn from the verified country dossier. We never fabricate facts; candidate items are gated out of customer-facing copy.
The April-2026 voluntary-NI regime change: cheap Class 2 from abroad is abolished and a one-time transitional door (old rules, incl. Class-2 payers switching without the 10-year residence test) has its own closing date, confirmed by the Future Pension Centre.
The cheap voluntary-NI window lapses at the transitional door; outside it, only the standard 6-year backdating remains and older years fall away year by year. Workplace pots are preserved (not auto-paid).
Personal-record access wall: Government Gateway (the personal State Pension forecast / NI record)
Companies House and the government's free Pension Tracing Service are both public, PTS returns scheme contact details only, never balances or membership confirmation, and a well-known commercial namesake (pensiontracingservice.com) is not the government service. The genuine difficulty in UK pension lineage is that employers get acquired, schemes get bulk-bought, providers rebrand, and a 1990s payroll deduction can land in a scheme with a name nobody at the original employer would recognise today.
From abroad: Public records and PTS work from anywhere without your credentials; the personal state-pension forecast needs Government Gateway, and HMRC's identity checks can be hard to pass from overseas. The harder problem from abroad isn't the gateway, it's that scheme-name continuity in the UK breaks repeatedly across decades, and reading that history is what the work actually is.
Many bilateral/reciprocal agreements; post-Brexit EU-UK protocol preserves aggregation. Where you retire decides whether your UK State Pension rises each year or freezes at its first payment for life. Australia, Canada and New Zealand freeze it; the USA does not.
Primary sources: gov.uk/find-pension-contact-details · gov.uk (voluntary NI / state pension) · developer.company-information.service.gov.uk
Every line below is drawn from the verified country dossier. We never fabricate facts; candidate items are gated out of customer-facing copy.
The §210 contribution refund irreversibly extinguishes the ENTIRE record (old-age, disability, survivor cover, all credited periods), yet with 60 totalized months you may already hold a vested pension; plus the Mütterrente child-raising screen.
The record never lapses by inaction, but late claiming permanently forfeits months past the §99 3-month window (post-67 delay partly offset). DRV stops proactive contact ~3 years after leaving.
Personal-record access wall: Digitale Rentenübersicht (German/EU eID + Steuer-ID; third-country leavers locked out)
A postal DRV Kontenklärung route is available, startable with only the lifelong Versicherungsnummer, no eID, results posted
From abroad: Germany is unusual among walled markets: the personal record can be opened from abroad with only the lifelong insurance number, no eID required, the genuine difficulty is occupational (bAV), which has no national register at all and where employer continuity over decades is the bottleneck.
Totalization across EU/EEA/CH + ~18 bilaterals (incl. US, CA, AU, JP, IN); German periods <12 months absorbed by the other EU state.
Primary sources: deutsche-rentenversicherung.de · gesetze-im-internet.de (SGB VI)
United Kingdom and Germany pensions are not pooled or auto-consolidated. Each leg is worked on its own: registers searched in United Kingdom, registers searched in Germany, and contact details surfaced where the dossier supports it. State pensions may be affected by bilateral or reciprocal agreements between the two jurisdictions, each country page records what its dossier establishes; we do not invent treaty effects.
Yes. Our report covers identification work in both United Kingdom and Germany as separate jurisdictions. Each country's pensions are administered locally; we work each one using the access route published on its country page.
No. Pensions accrued in United Kingdom stay with United Kingdom schemes; pensions accrued in Germany stay with Germany schemes. They are administered separately. Bilateral and reciprocal agreements may affect state pension aggregation in some pairs, see each country page for what its dossier records.
An identification-only report covering both jurisdictions: registers searched, any provider matches with contact details, and any registers that require you to check directly using your own credentials. We do not give financial advice, transfer pensions, or estimate values.
Full refund if we find nothing material. Fixed fee, $99 Country Pension Identification Report, $499 Enhanced Pension Identification Report, $799 Global (covers all requested countries).