A woman who was denied her widow’s pension on account of her age when she lost her husband has asked whether or not she can claim the sum now that she’s older.

Conscious she would never receive the state pension her husband saved for, the woman wrote into This is Money to explain her situation.

She said: “My husband died in 2008. He was 60, I was 47 and a full-time nurse. He didn’t get a pension and sadly died before pension age. I never received widow’s pension as I was apparently too young.

“Can I claim his pension when I reach state pension age I am currently 63 and not remarried? I cannot find his National insurance number but I have his death certificate and our marriage certificate.”

Steve Webb, pensions expert and partner at LCP explained the short answer to her question is that she may receive an additional inherited amount on top of whatever state pension she has built up in her own right. However, a lot depends on your late husband’s work history.

Concerned about her late husband’s state pension, one woman wondered whether she would ever receive any payment.

Her husband died in 2008 at 60 years old which means he could not get a pension as he died before state pension age.

She also never received her widow’s pension as she was just 47 when he died.

Some widows can inherit part of their deceased partner’s Additional State Pension if their marriage or civil partnership with them began before April 6, 2016.

However, this is only possible if either their partner reached State Pension age before April 6, 2016 or they died before April 6, 2016 but would have reached State Pension age on or after that day.

The rules show she may be able to inherit 50 percent of the ‘additional state pension‘ which her late husband built up over his working life. (This is often also known as a ‘SERPS’ pension, which stands for the state earnings-related pension scheme).

This is true even though her husband sadly never lived to draw his pension.

Mr Webb said: “If your husband built up rights under the SERPS scheme, which would be based on his paid employment from April 6, 1978 onwards, then you should automatically have half of this pension added to your state pension on retirement.

“What I cannot say without sight of your late husband’s NI record, is how big this sum might be, or indeed whether there would be any inheritance at all.”

Her husband may have little or no SERPS pension at all if he was always paid self-employed National Insurance or if he was ‘contracted out’ of his company pension scheme for many years.

If he was contracted out then his earnings-related pension would have been built up through his occupational pension scheme.

Mr Webb stated that If she, as his widow, is now getting a widow’s pension from such a scheme, then the chances are that there is “not much additional state pension to inherit on top”.

However, if neither of these things is true – he was not self-employed and he was not in a company pension or similar – then there may well be a meaningful amount of additional state pension for you to inherit, he said

The pensions expert suggested that the easiest way to check for sure would be to ring the Future Pension Centre and ask how much inherited additional state pension they are likely to receive.