Old Age Security

Old Age Security is paid out of general revenue. There is no contribution to it and no record of one: the Act never counts a payment, a year worked or an insured period. Someone who has never held a job qualifies on the same terms as someone who worked for forty years, provided they have lived in Canada long enough.

The pension begins at 65 years, and there is no earlier or reduced version of it. The amount is a fraction: your years of residence in Canada after turning 18, over 40. Reach the full 40 and you are paid the whole pension; below 10 years nothing is payable at all.

The Old Age Security Act carries the amount enacted for the first quarter of 1985 and the rule that has adjusted it every quarter since; the amount actually paid is published by Service Canada and is in no instrument. It could not be sourced for this build, so this section states none of it. What it states instead is every rule that decides the amount, read from the Act.

The Act does print a dollar figure, and it is worth seeing why it is no help. This is real, in-force, correctly cited law — and it is what the pension was in the first quarter of 1985.

Since then it has been adjusted 4 times a year — on 1 January, 1 April, 1 July, 1 October — by the ratio of two Consumer Price Index readings, and by a rule that never lets it fall. Forty years of that is the whole difference between the figure above and what arrives in a bank account, and none of it is written down in any legislation.

This page does not calculate a pension amount. The fraction is fully sourced — your years of residence over forty, rounded down to a whole year — but the full monthly pension it is a fraction OF is a quarterly-indexed figure published by Service Canada that this build could not source. A calculator could work out your fraction and still not tell you what it is worth.

Whether you qualify at all is age and residence; what the fraction comes to, and the two rules that change it, are on how the amount is worked out.