Old Age Security eligibility

Qualifying takes two things: turning 65, and enough years of residence in Canada after the age of 18. Forty years earns a full pension and ten is the minimum for a partial one — but between ten and twenty there is a further condition that decides entitlement outright, and it is the one people living abroad miss.

This section explains the rules, not the current amounts

Every rule and every figure on this page is read from one primary source: the Old Age Security Act (R.S.C. 1985, c. O-9), as consolidated on the Justice Laws Website and retrieved on 12 August 2026. Each figure below carries the section it was read from.

What you will not find here is a current payment amount. The Act sets out how the pension is worked out, but the dollar figure it prints is the one enacted for the first quarter of 1985, kept in the statute as the base a quarterly adjustment has run on ever since. The amount actually paid is published by Service Canada and appears in no legislation. Check it there, or in your My Service Canada Account, which is the only place that reflects your own record.

These rules have not been through this site’s own review and sign-off. Do not rely on them for an application or a financial decision: read the cited section, or speak to Service Canada.

Age, and one number of years

Every route in the Act requires that you have attained 65 years. There is no transition schedule, no distinction between men and women, and nothing claimable earlier — which makes this the simplest qualifying age of any pension in this family.

The second condition is residence. 40 years in Canada after turning 18 earns a full pension. Between 10 and 40 years earns a partial one. Below 10, nothing is payable under this Part.

Residence in Canada after attaining eighteen years of age and before the day the application is approved, aggregated. Where that aggregate is fewer than TWENTY years, s 3(2)(b) additionally requires that the applicant was resident in Canada on the day preceding approval — so someone with fifteen years living abroad does not qualify, and someone with twenty-five does.

The condition people living abroad miss

Read that definition again for the twenty-year line, because it decides entitlement outright rather than reducing an amount. If your aggregate residence is under twenty years, you must also have been resident in Canada on the day before your application is approved.

So someone with fifteen years’ residence who has moved abroad does not qualify at all, while someone with twenty-five does — and the difference is not the ten years, it is which side of that line they fall. It is the single most consequential condition on this page and the one least likely to be known.

The closed routes to a full pension

The Act also carries two routes keyed on 1 July 1977. Both are closed cohorts, live law for the people inside them rather than options anyone can take up now; the route that reaches anybody applying today is 65 years plus 40 years’ residence.

A person who was already a pensioner on 1 July 1977 receives a full pension.
Old Age Security Act s 3(1)(a)
A closed transitional route for a person who on 1 July 1977 was 25 or over and resident in Canada (or held a valid immigration visa): a full pension on ten years’ residence immediately before approval, or on a presence test of three times the periods of absence plus one year immediately before approval.
Old Age Security Act s 3(1)(b)