Survivor’s pension: what changes according to your pension plan

On the death of a life partner, his spouse is entitled to receive part of his retirement pension, also called survivor’s pension. Several conditions are essential in order to be able to claim it, in particular a certain number of years of marriage and a ceiling of annual resources. According to recent figures from the DREES on pensions, nearly 4,408,000 beneficiaries received a survivor’s pension as of December 31, 2016. Find out what are the mandatory prerequisites and the changes planned soon according to your plan of retirement.

Precise criteria are necessary in order to obtain a survivor’s pension. Among the main ones, it is absolutely necessary to be or to have been married to the missing spouse. You cannot, therefore, claim a survivor’s pension if you were in a PACS or if you were cohabiting with your partner. You must also be at least 55 years old, however if the death occurred before 2009, the threshold is lowered to 51 years old. A gross annual income ceiling has also been set: it is thus not possible to exceed 23,441.60 euros for a single person or 37,506.56 for a couple.

To apply for a survivor’s pension, you can log in via your personal retirement space or send a letter to the pension fund of the missing person. You can select the date of your choice for the first payment of the pension. Without preference, payment will be made on the 1st day of the month following the submission of your request.

In the list of criteria, marriage is an obligation that cannot be negotiated. However, the number of years of marriage has no effect on obtaining a survivor’s pension. This time spent with the missing life partner may nevertheless be important in calculating the amount. Each pension plan thus includes precise specificities to know.

For example, if you were married to an insured person working in the civil service, the duration of the marriage must be at least 4 years. The period may be reduced to two years if these years occur before his retirement. If you had children together, these conditions are automatically removed.

In some cases, the remarriage of the surviving spouse results in the loss of the survivor’s pension. This is, for example, the case for supplementary schemes such as Agirc-Arrco or MSA. For craftsmen, traders and workers in the private sector, on the other hand, no minimum duration of marriage is required and the survivor’s pension remains, even in the event of remarriage.

If your deceased spouse has, for his part, been married several times, the survivor’s pension can also be shared between all of his partners. This sharing is thus proportional to the duration of each marriage. This perspective is the same for all pension plans.