Many women could be in line for an average payout of £13,500 due to a state pension error.
An investigation from This Is Money and former pensions minister Sir Steve Webb has revealed many didn't get the hike in payments.
Married women who retired on small state pensions before April 2016 could be impacted by the error.
This is because their payments should have risen to 60% of their husband's basic state pension.
Since 2008, the increases are supposed to be automatic, but before women had to apply to get the full amount they were due.
This tax year, the full state pension is £134.25 a week so the women should get £80.45 (60%) instead of the typical £67 a week.
According to The Guardian, women were getting as little as 87p per week.
The Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) has now published plans to tackle the underpayments to those who are impacted.
Now it is estimated around £2.7billion is owed to around 200,000 women.
The error happened when an old scheme, which meant women's pensions were linked to their husbands, had changed.
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In 2016, the policy was deemed unfair so women's pensions were no longer linked to their husbands.
The current Pensions Minister Guy Opperman said in a statement: "We are committed to making sure that those people found to have been underpaid State Pension receive the money they are rightly entitled to.
"We became aware of issues with State Pension underpayments in 2020 and we took immediate action to investigate the extent of the problem.
"This is an issue that dates back many years across successive Governments. Rectifying these cases is a priority for the Department and we will do it as quickly as possible."
The DWP forecast said around 200,000 married women, widows and over 80s are owed £2.7billion.
So the amount, split between the thousands of women, comes to an average payment of £13,500 each.
But the DWP said these figures are just an estimate and payments will be made on a case by case basis since the amount can differ.
In some cases, This Is Money found underpayments had been huge with one widow owed a whopping £115,000.
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To work out if you've been impacted, you can use an online tool to check.
Women on pensions less than £80 a week who are married, widowed or in a civil partnership before they were changed in 2016 are affected.
The DWP said it has carried out scans of legacy computer systems that analysed many millions of State Pension records.
For more information, you can call the Pension Service by visiting the GOV.UK website.
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