FIRE glossary
Social Security Equivalent (State Pension / National Schemes)
US Social Security's counterpart outside the US is whatever state or national pension scheme the country you've contributed to (or reside in) runs — each one sets its own claim age, and its own rules (sometimes none at all) for rewarding deferral or penalising an early claim.
What US Social Security is
US Social Security (OASDI) pays a monthly benefit from a Full Retirement Age of 67, claimable as early as 62 at a reduced rate or deferred to 70 for a bonus. It's funded by a lifetime of payroll contributions and, for a US-based retiree, sits alongside 401(k)/IRA savings as one leg of the retirement stool.
The closest equivalent in your country
Almost every country Ember covers runs some version of the same idea — a state-administered pension with its own claim age and its own reward for waiting. The UK's New State Pension adds roughly 5.8% a year for every year you defer past State Pension age, with no early-claim option at all. Canada layers a contributory CPP on top of a flat-rate OAS, each with separate age windows. Germany, France, Spain, Ireland and the Netherlands each run their own contributory schemes, with deferral bonuses that range from about 4% to 6.5% a year. Australia's Age Pension breaks the pattern entirely — it's means-tested on income and assets rather than adjusted for claim age, so there's no deferral lever to model. Italy recalculates its benefit from a notional-defined-contribution formula rather than applying a flat bonus. And the UAE — home to much of Ember's user base — runs no state pension scheme at all for foreign residents; there is honestly no equivalent to model.
How Ember treats the claim-age decision
Ember's engine carries versioned claim-age rules for nine schemes with a genuine deferral or early-claim lever (the UK, US, both Canadian schemes, Germany, France, Spain, Ireland, the Netherlands) plus Australia and Italy, rendered honestly as having no such lever. Each rule is sourced, dated and carries a confidence label. Confidence is lowest for France and Spain, where a genuine early-claim formula would need contribution-history data Ember doesn't model, so both are encoded defer-only rather than guessed; Ireland, the Netherlands and Italy also carry lower confidence, each for its own scheme-specific reason rather than a shared one. Means-testing and clawbacks — Australia's Age Pension test, Canada's OAS recovery tax, the US's WEP/GPO rules for people with mixed-country careers — are out of scope in this version and flagged as such rather than silently ignored.
Across borders
This is the term where "moved abroad" can quietly break a plan. The UK State Pension keeps rising each year only if you live in the UK, the EEA, Switzerland or a reciprocal-agreement country — retire to the UAE, Australia or Canada instead and it freezes in cash terms at whatever it was when you arrived, with inflation eating the real value every year after. The UAE itself runs no state pension at all for foreign residents, so a UAE-based retirement plan has to treat this whole category as zero and lean on personal savings and any scheme still owed from a previous country. Claiming from two or three countries' schemes across an internationally mobile career is normal, but each one keeps its own claim age, deferral rule and (sometimes) means test — they don't merge into one number, which is why Ember models each pension a person adds as its own row rather than one blended figure.
Common questions
Does Ember model every country's state pension the same way?
No — it's honest about the gap between countries with a clean actuarial deferral/early-claim formula (the UK, US, Canada, Germany and a handful of others) and countries where claiming age isn't a simple lever at all. Australia's Age Pension is means-tested rather than age-adjusted, and Italy recalculates its notional-defined-contribution coefficient by age rather than applying a flat bonus — both show up in Ember with no claim-age slider, instead of a guessed formula that doesn't actually exist.
What if I've paid into more than one country's scheme?
Add each pension separately with its own country and scheme — Ember doesn't total or reconcile entitlements across countries for you. Real-world coordination agreements between countries (which affect eligibility and amounts) are a research question outside what this tool covers; treat each row as that country's standalone estimate.
If I retire somewhere else, does my state pension keep rising?
It depends entirely on the paying country's own rules, and Ember tries to reflect that rather than assume uprating continues everywhere. The UK State Pension, for example, only keeps its annual increase while you live in the UK, the EEA, Switzerland or a reciprocal-agreement country — move to the UAE, Australia or Canada and it freezes at the rate first paid there.
Related terms
See social security equivalent (state pension / national schemes) in your numbers
The free calculator gives a rough estimate; the full planner models your actual accounts, pensions, residency moves and taxes — with the maths behind every figure shown.