There are several changes in circumstances people receiving Personal Independence Payments (PIP) must tell the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) about or risk losing their benefit entitlement and having regular payments paused or stopped. Changing your name, doctor or address do not need to be reported and will have no impact on your payments or your award.
However, leaving the country or planning to leave the country for a period of more than four weeks, even for just a holiday, may affect entitlement. Guidance in the 2023/24 edition of the PIP Handbook on GOV.UK states: “This change may affect the claimant’s entitlement to PIP. We will need to know the date the claimant is leaving the country, how long they are planning to be out of the country, which country they are going to and why they are going abroad.”
Reporting a change is simple, there is a dedicated PIP enquiry line to call on 0800 121 443, however, the latest call answering times from DWP indicate that the average time taken to connect a call with an advisor in May was over 40 minutes.
