Age Pension residence rules: the 10-year test and the India agreement

The suitcases are unpacked, then comes the first conversation about the Age Pension and the number that ends it. A parent who becomes an Australian resident at 63 will be 73 before the residence test is met. The qualifying age is 67, but the Age Pension residence rules come first: 10 years as an Australian resident, at least five of them in one unbroken stretch. For parents who migrate from India in their sixties, the decade is the wait, and a working life in India does not shorten it.

Australia and India have had a social security agreement in operation since 1 January 2016, and the Department of Social Services says it helps people qualify for benefits “they might not otherwise get”. On the published rules, though, it can count only one kind of Indian time, and only for people who had at least a year of residence here before turning 58.

The Age Pension residence rules start at permanent residence

Services Australia sets out the rule in a few lines. A person generally needs at least 10 years as an Australian resident in total, and for at least five of those years “there must be no break in your residence”. On the day they claim, they generally must be a resident and in Australia.

Residence has a narrow meaning here: living in Australia as a citizen or the holder of a permanent visa. Years spent coming and going on a visitor visa are not in the count; it begins with living here as a permanent resident. Refugees and former refugees are exempt from the 10-year rule, and a woman whose partner dies while both are residents can qualify after 104 unbroken weeks of residence immediately before she claims.

What the India agreement counts, and what it leaves out

On the Australian side the agreement covers one payment, the Age Pension, and it works by addition: Australian residence plus periods of coverage in India must together reach 10 years.

The detail is in which Indian periods qualify. Services Australia’s factsheet on the agreement, accurate as at July 2025, says: “Only periods of insurance in India after 1 January 2016 may be used.” The department’s guide adds a second filter: “Only a period of contributions to the EPS can be used to totalise for Australian age pension.” The EPS is India’s Employees’ Pension Scheme 1995, a pension for employed people within the country’s provident fund law.

So a career in India that ended before 2016 adds nothing, however long it was. Nor do years outside that scheme.

Twelve months here before 58

A further condition settles the matter for a parent who first becomes a resident in their sixties. Anyone who needs Indian periods to reach the 10 years must also have at least 12 months of what the rules call Australian working life residence, six of them continuous, and under the India agreement those months must fall between 16 November 1995 and age 58. Both markers come from India’s own scheme: the Employees’ Pension Scheme came into force on 16 November 1995, and the department’s glossary calls 58 the Indian retirement age.

A parent who first becomes a resident at 58 or older therefore has no months to count, whatever was paid into the EPS, and the arithmetic closes the other side: anyone who becomes a resident by their 57th birthday and stays reaches 10 years of residence by 67 without the agreement. What is left for the agreement are lives split between the two countries: a man, say, who lived here as a permanent resident in his forties, went back to an EPS-covered job in India after 2016, and later returned.

An Indian pension comes off the top

For the people it reaches, the agreement also changes how an Indian pension is treated. While they live in Australia and rely on it, the guide says the Indian benefit is “directly deducted from the maximum rate of Australian age pension”. The income and assets tests are then run against that lower maximum, and the lower of the two results is paid.

That lasts only while the agreement is needed. Once the person has 10 years of Australian residence in their own right, the Indian pension “will be treated as ordinary income”. A direct deduction takes the whole Indian payment off the maximum rate, while under the income test, income above a free area reduces the pension by 50 cents in the dollar for a single person and by 25 cents in the dollar for each member of a couple.

Two rules apply with or without the agreement. It has no clause making a claim for an Indian pension compulsory, but under social security law Services Australia can issue a legal notice requiring an Age Pension claimant or recipient to take reasonable action to claim a comparable foreign payment. And income and assets held in another country are counted when the rate is assessed, converted at exchange rates.

The other clocks running through the same decade

The 10 years do not run alone. For contributory parent visas, the Assurance of Support lasts 10 years from the parent’s arrival or the visa grant, whichever is later; Services Australia describes it as the assurer’s promise to repay any income support paid to the migrant. For most other visas it runs for four years.

The Commonwealth Seniors Health Card keeps a shorter clock. A concession card for cheaper health care, it is open to residents of Age Pension age who are not on a pension or benefit and meet an income test. For visas granted from 1 January 2019 it carries a four-year newly arrived resident’s waiting period, and only time physically in Australia counts towards it.

The agreement asks two things of a parent: contributions to India’s Employees’ Pension Scheme since 2016, and a year of residence here before 58. A parent without both is counted by the residence rules alone, one year at a time, until there are 10.