Time spent raising children can be counted towards pensions. A father has sued the Federal Social Court - he feels discriminated against in the allocation of times.
Kassel – Most retirees receive a statutory pension. The following applies: the more you have worked and earned money, the more payments you will receive from the statutory pension insurance in old age. However, other factors such as time spent raising children also contribute to what statutory pension payments may look like in old age. But are fathers discriminated against when allocating child-rearing time for the pension?
Child-rearing time for the pension: Fathers must prove primary care
The Federal Social Court (BSG) in Kassel will examine this on Thursday (April 18, 2024). In case of doubt, the child-rearing times would have to be divided equally. But the court decided: Fathers are not discriminated against when allocating child-rearing time for the pension. The BSG announced that there is no unconstitutional discrimination against men in the fact that, in cases of doubt, child-rearing periods and periods taken into account for raising children are recognized in the statutory pension insurance for the mother. According to the current rules, parents can decide together to whom the pension insurance should credit the child-rearing periods. (Af. B 5 R 10/23 R)
If there is no such explanation, they are usually credited to the mother. To break this default rule, fathers must demonstrate their predominant concern. According to the pension insurance company and the lower courts, this was not possible for the first seven years of the daughter's life. However, the mother then moved out of the shared apartment and also left the child.
Therefore, the pension insurance provider only reserved the time from the mother's departure for the father as the time taken into account for raising children. For the period before that, the reservation of periods under pension law due to raising children was rejected because, according to the pension insurance, it was assumed that the child would be raised together, reports Spiegel
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Child-rearing time for the pension: who can apply for this?
It's definitely worth it to have child-rearing periods taken into account: this increases the pension in about the same way as if the mother or father had continued to earn and pay contributions on average after the birth as before. If the children were born before 1992, the child-rearing period is 30 months, and for children born later it is 36 months.
In order to have this time taken into account, parents must apply for child-rearing time before retirement. This works with form V0800 from the pension insurance. In addition to the biological parents, adoptive, step or foster parents can also apply for child-rearing time - and self-employed people and freelancers who do not pay into pension insurance are also entitled to this. However, only one parent can have the child-rearing time counted - but it is possible to split it up. Of course, this also assumes that the parents agree - which is not the case in the case before the Federal Social Court.
Pension: Every fifth woman over 65 is at risk of poverty
Even if mothers are given priority over fathers when calculating child-rearing time, unless there is another explanation, it must also be noted that as a rule, women still take on the majority of child-rearing work in Germany. By taking these into account, the pension can be increased, but women are still much more affected by old-age poverty than men. In Germany, one in five women over 65 is considered to be at risk of poverty. The retirement income of women has recently been, on average, almost a third lower than that of men.
With material from AFP