The AHV/AVS pension is calculated from two elements: income and the number of years of contributions. The second is often overlooked, although it carries a lot of weight. A year without contributions reduces the pension, and that reduction lasts for life. Yet a gap is often discovered too late to be filled.
Why a missing year matters
The contribution period is complete when a person has the same number of contribution years as the insured people in their age group. If any are missing, the pension is a partial one. According to the AHV/AVS leaflet on old-age pensions, one missing contribution year in principle reduces the old-age pension by at least 1/44.
The effect adds up. Two missing years reduce the pension by at least 2/44, or about 4.5%, and this reduction applies to every payment, throughout retirement. Over twenty or twenty-five years of pension, a gap of a few years therefore represents a large sum, out of all proportion to the contributions that would have avoided it.
Gaps arise from ordinary situations: studies without gainful employment, a stay abroad, a period with neither a job nor benefits, a break to look after children without the credits being taken into account. They do not show on the payslip; you have to look for them in your account.
Who must contribute, even without working
People without gainful employment must also contribute, from 1 January of the year after they turn 20. Students without gainful employment pay the minimum contribution until 31 December of the year in which they reach 25. According to the Federal Social Insurance Office (FSIO), the minimum contribution to AHV/AVS, IV/AI and EO/APG is 530 francs a year.
A common example: a 22-year-old student with no income must register with the compensation office and pay at least the minimum contribution. If she does not, the year remains empty on her account. She will still be able to make it up for five years; beyond that, the gap will be permanent, and the pension for her whole retirement will bear the mark of it.
Checking your individual account
Every insured person has individual accounts, in which the information needed to calculate their pension is recorded. They are entitled to ask each compensation office that keeps an account for them for a statement of the entries; the statement is provided free of charge. If they find an error in it, they can ask for it to be corrected within thirty days of receiving the statement.
Since several compensation offices may keep an account for the same person, as employers and cantons change, it is useful to request statements from all the offices concerned. The official AHV/AVS and IV/AI portal offers a form for requesting an account statement.
The statement shows, for each office, the entries made in your account. It is often enough to go through it year by year to spot an empty year or an income that is clearly too low; that is the moment to act, while a correction is still possible.
The five-year deadline
Making up a gap has a strict limit. Contributions that have not been set by a decision within five years from the end of the calendar year for which they are due can no longer be claimed, nor paid. A missing year more than five years old can therefore no longer be filled by paying.
This is the practical reason to check your account early, and regularly: a gap discovered at 60 often concerns years that can no longer be made up, whereas it could have been at 30.
What can still fill a gap
Two mechanisms help without any payment. Youth years, meaning contribution periods completed between the ages of 18 and 20, can be taken into account to fill later gaps. And years for which childcare credits or care credits are granted count as contribution years.
Childcare credits relate to the years during which the person was insured under AHV/AVS and looked after children under 16. They are not paid out: they are taken into account when the pension is calculated. It is nonetheless useful to check, when applying for the pension, that the compensation office knows about these years, particularly after a divorce or a stay abroad.
- Request an account statement from each compensation office concerned, then go through it year by year.
- Report any error within thirty days of receiving the statement.
- For a missing year less than five years old, contact the compensation office to find out whether it can still be paid.
- During studies, a stay without gainful employment or a break, register with your commune's compensation office to pay at least the minimum contribution.