Calculating the amount of your retirement pension is not easy, especially when you have not had a linear career. But one change in direction in particular can significantly reduce your income, without you anticipating it.
For most French people, when it comes time to calculate their retirement amount, every cent counts. A journey then opens that would make any person with administrative phobia pale: you have to find out about all the social assistance available, know the little boxes to check on the tax return to sometimes save hundreds of euros, but also (and above all) carefully check your famous career statement! Over four decades of work, it’s difficult to remember every detail, from the very first internship as a teenager to the last position held in your sixties. Between the forgotten quarters or the periods of work not taken into account, the calculation can quickly be distorted… and the sweet and sunny retirement that we had imagined then turns into a financial and bureaucratic headache.
Above all, today’s careers are less linear: we change companies, or even professions or sectors, more often, which means contributing to several different pension plans. In France, according to the DREES, a little more than one in four retirees are on multiple pensions. They then do not receive a single pension but several, paid by different organizations, making the calculation even more complicated. This is especially the case for people who have made a professional change between the public and private sectors.
Increasingly frequent mixed careers – such as a teacher who decides to go to work or, conversely, an employee who becomes a town hall civil servant for example – which pose a real question regarding the calculation of retirement. Still according to the DREES, the average pension of a public service retiree reaches 2,440 euros gross per month, compared to only 1,530 euros for a private sector retiree, a difference of 910 euros. And even if we add the private supplementary pension (Agirc-Arrco), the gap remains 690 euros on average. A significant amount which can be explained in particular by the calculation method.
The basic private pension is based on the average annual salary over the best 25 years, to which a liquidation rate of 50% maximum is then applied. On the public side, it is the salary of the last six months (excluding bonuses) which is retained, while the rate is 75%. And if you have moved between the public and the private sector, your pensions are simply added up: each plan will pay you a pension proportional to the quarters you have completed there. Concretely, it is better to start out in the private sector and join the public service for the second half of your career, and therefore benefit from the best rate on the highest salary. The opposite could cause you to lose a lot of money! But be careful, these mixed careers present some little-known pitfalls, which can appear like a cold shower when you hadn’t anticipated them.
If you have worked less than 25 years in the private sector, the fund will take all your years to calculate your average, including your first poorly paid jobs. Furthermore, be wary of the two-year rule: a period of less than 24 months in the public service does not give right to a state pension (your rights are then transferred to the general system). To avoid losing a single euro, the essential reflex is to go through your overall career statement on the official Info-Retraite portal to check that no quarter has been forgotten.
