What people told us after contacting a pension institution
Method published on 14 October 2026.
Our reachability study asks each national pension institution in writing how a person abroad can reach it. This page reports the other side: what people told us happened when they contacted the institution themselves. It covers the 54 institutions in our reachability register, one per national system, named as on the reachability study.
Institutions with published figures
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How we ask
About 90 days after a free check, or after we delivered a report, we send one email. It goes only to people who chose it with its own consent tick, and only once. For each country in the check or the report, it names the institution our register holds for that country and asks three closed questions:
- Did you contact the institution? Answers: Yes, No.
- Did you get an answer? Answers: Yes, No, Not yet.
- How many weeks did it take? Answers: Under 2, 2 to 4, 4 to 8, 8 to 12, Over 12, No answer yet.
Each answer is one click on a link that carries a random code and nothing else. There is no text box, so nobody can tell us more than these answers. Each code records one set of answers once; a second click on the same question changes nothing.
What we publish
An outcome is one set of answers in which the person said they contacted the institution. We publish an institution once it has at least 5 outcomes; below that its page says that there are not enough outcomes yet, shows no number, and is not offered to search engines. For each published institution we show how many people said they contacted it, how many of them said they got an answer, and the middle of the reported times, written as "answered within N weeks" where it falls in a bounded band. Each figure carries the dates of the answers it comes from.
We store answers without the email address they came from, and we publish totals only, never a single answer. Answers from our own test runs are excluded in the database before any total is counted.
What these figures are not
The answers are self-reported. We do not check them with the institution, and the people who answer are those who chose the follow-up, not a sample of everyone who contacted it. This is factual reporting of what people told us. It is not advice, not a rating and not a ranking: the list above is in country order.
The institutions' own written answers to our questions are on the answers page, and how we scored the written correspondence is on the reachability method page.