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HMRC write to 800,000 self-employed to address incorrect gaps in their state pension worth £1000s

ended 17. July 2026

If you became self-employed between 2015 and 2024, you may have incorrect gaps in your National Insurance record, and that could reduce your State Pension by thousands.

MoneySavingExpert reported this week that around 800,000 people may be affected by an issue with people not completing a "CWF1" form when they started self-employment.

Since 2015 you needed to register for Self Assessment and separately tell HMRC you were self-employed via that form. But if you missed the CWF1 form - Class 2 contributions may not have been assessed correctly, even if you filed correct tax returns.

HMRC has fixed the systems going forward, and for anyone affected, they are writing to people to let them know, and give you a chance to close any gaps.

Questions for newspagers:

+ Do issues like this point to the huge learning curve for small businesses when starting out, and a gap in support for the self-employed?

+ Does the digitisation of HMRC mean we're likely to see more or less issues like i the coming years?

+ What trust do we have in HMRC to address these issues, considering they themselves have failed to pass so many audits in recent years?

3 responses from the Newspage community

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Editor
Harvey Dhillon
Founder & CEO at Zmartly
You can do everything a tax return asks of you and still end up with a hole in your pension, all because of a form nobody tells you about. That is what has caught up to 800,000 people who went self-employed between 2015 and 2024. Here is the part you cannot see. Class 4 National Insurance, the big one you pay on profit, does not build your State Pension. Class 2, at £3.65 a week today, is the one that does, and the CWF1 form was the switch that turned it on. Miss the form and your returns can be flawless while the years quietly fail to count. This lands on the first-time sole trader, not the seasoned firm with an accountant. Around 160,000 of those affected are already at or near pension age. HMRC has now made this automatic from 2024/25, which is digitisation doing its job, and to its credit it is writing to people. My advice is do not wait for the letter. Check your record now, and if there is a gap you can usually pay back to 2015 at the original rates.
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Editor
Nouran Moustafa
Practice Principal & IFA at Roxton Wealth
This exposes the hidden cost of becoming self-employed: people are expected to master tax, National Insurance, pensions and reporting from day one, often without meaningful guidance. Someone could file accurate tax returns for years and still lose State Pension entitlement because they missed a separate form they did not know existed. That is not simply individual error; it is a system design failure.

Digitisation should reduce duplication and flag missing information earlier, but poorly connected systems can also scale mistakes across hundreds of thousands of records. Automation is only progress when the data and safeguards behind it work.

HMRC must now contact everyone affected, explain the remedy clearly and make corrections simple. Trust will not be rebuilt through reassurance alone. It requires transparency, independent scrutiny and proof that people will not be financially punished for gaps created by HMRC’s own processes.
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Editor
Ross Lacey
Director & Independent Financial Adviser at Fairview Financial Management
We'd encourage anybody, self-employed and employed to check their state pension forecast as soon as possible. This is something that's easy to do using the Government Gateway .

The state pension makes up a meaningful part of most people's retirement income, with a married couple currently getting around £25k a year between them. Missing years can have a big impact on this, and there are ways to ensure you get the full state pension when the time comes, so it pays to understand whether there will be any shortfalls as early as possible.