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The purpose of social security agreements

Social security agreements exist for three main purposes:

1. •

   to ensure contributions are not paid twice on the same earnings

2. •

   to offer some protection to social security benefit entitlements by allowing contributions to be aggregated or treated as having been paid in another country

3. •

   to ensure contributions are payable somewhere

Agreements can be between two individual countries, such as the bilateral agreement between the UK and the US, or the UK and Turkey, but they can also be agreed by groups of countries. The largest in the latter category is the EU which covers all the Member States plus some EEA countries (see the EU provisions guidance note). The UK also has a collective agreement with Jersey, Guernsey and most of the other smaller Channel Islands. Most countries with developed social security schemes will have a series of agreements.

Some countries, such as the US, have a fairly standard format for their agreements with only minor variations from country to country (see below