How to retire without contributing in recent years: this is how the ‘bracket doctrine’ works

The last years of the working career of workers are extremely important with a view to obtaining their future retirement pension. Not only because the requirements to obtain it force you to work in at least two of the last 15 before requesting retirement, but because, in parallel, they are the ones that determine the amount of the pension that you will receive when you retire definitively.

Currently, to calculate the retirement pension, the last 25 years of work are taken into account: to find out what the worker’s regulatory base is, the last 300 contribution bases are taken and divided by 350. The result is that base regulation on which later it will be necessary to apply different percentages to which one is entitled based on the years worked (to have 50% you need 15 years and to be able to collect 100% you have to work 36 years).

That’s why it’s so important not lose contribution bases in the last years of career. The reason is that, if that happens, there is the possibility of having a smaller regulatory base and, therefore, having a lower retirement pension.

Although the regulations already contemplate the mechanism of the integration of gaps (which allows to fill the periods without contributing with between 50 and 100% of the minimum base at each moment), since the jurisprudence has already worked sometimes in this sense putting in practice the so-called ‘bracket doctrine’.

The operation is simple: the years in which the worker has not been able to contribute are placed in a ‘parenthesis’ and the previous years are taken into account to calculate the pension. Of course, for this to be done, it must be proven that the worker, despite not getting a job, did not give up his desire to get a new job.

These cases in which the ‘bracket doctrine’ could apply are varied: from the long-term unemployed who accumulate years without a job (especially in the hardest years of the last economic crisis) to people who receive non-contributory disability pensions or even more extreme cases such as that of people who have served prison sentences.

This is how the ‘bracket doctrine’ applies

This last case was that of a citizen whose retirement pension was denied after serving a 20-year prison sentence. She challenged the decision of Social Security in court and the Social Chamber of the Supreme Court decided to apply the ‘parenthesis doctrine’ to rectify the body and grant the retirement pension to this person.

Among the reasons put forward by the court (which can be consulted at this link on the website of the General Council of the Judiciary) were the absence of job offers from the penitentiary center and that at no time was a possible lack of willingness of the prisoner to perform any type of work, arguments for which the accumulated period without contributing “has to be considered as neutral time for the application of the parenthesis theory” and cannot be a reason for refusal of the retirement pension.