What was claimed
Keir Starmer says the government is cutting the state pension in April 2026 to 80% of its current value.
Our verdict
False. The government’s commitment to the ‘triple lock’ guarantees that the state pension increases annually, and we’ve seen no evidence to suggest that it is going down next year.
Videos circulating online claim that from April 2026 the government is adjusting the state pension so that pensioners will receive “80% of the current amount”.
The clips go on to claim that this will reduce the weekly payment from £221 to £177.
But this isn’t true. The government said in April that it has an “ironclad commitment” to the ‘triple lock’, which guarantees that the state pension increases annually by the highest of inflation, earnings growth or 2.5%.
This means that the state pension will increase next year, and we’ve seen no evidence to suggest the government has any plans to make such a major change to a system that’s generally been in place since 2011.
The videos feature a voice that sounds like the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer claiming “significant adjustments to the state pension” will come in from April 2026.
The videos claim this is part of a “national reform aimed at balancing the country’s budget and shifting financial support toward the working age population”.
But there are clear signs that the audio of the Prime Minister in these clips is not genuine.
The cadence of the audio is extremely even, the intonation sounds stiff and unnatural, and some words are pronounced unusually, such as £177 read as “one seventy seven” and April pronounced “Apri”, which suggests they are very likely to be AI-generated from misspelt text.
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The £221 a week figure given for the current state pension is also wrong.
The full basic state pension is for men born before 6 April 1951 and women born before 6 April 1953. It is currently £176.45 per week.
The full new state pension, for men born on or after 6 April 1951 and women born on or after 6 April 1953, is currently £230.25 a week.
The state pension is likely to rise by 4.8% in April 2026, because the rise in average earnings for May to July 2025 was 4.8%, which is higher than both inflation and 2.5%.
This means the full basic state pension is likely to rise by £8.45 to £184.90 a week, while the new state pension is likely to go up by £11.05 to £241.30 a week.
This is the latest in a series of videos we’ve been seeing that share misinformation about supposed new policies or rules, for example claims that UK residents leaving the country more than three times a year will be flagged for additional income and tax checks and that the government must now be notified about cash withdrawals over a certain amount.
We recently investigated several such videos falsely claiming that the UK government or other authorities are introducing new measures to limit personal freedoms, which have been shared hundreds of thousands of times. We found over a dozen TikTok accounts had been involved in sharing the videos. After we contacted the social media platform, it told us that all of them had been banned for breaching its rules, which do not allow “misinformation that could cause significant harm to individuals or society”.
It’s important to consider whether information you see on social media comes from a trustworthy and verifiable source before sharing it. Our toolkit provides some advice about how to do this.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because the government’s commitment to the ‘triple lock’ guarantees that the state pension increases annually.
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