Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan had a working discussion with Minister of Labor and Social Affairs Arsen Torosyan on pension increase.

The Prime Minister noted that a de jure decision should be made at the upcoming Government session on increasing pensions by 10,000 drams and inquired about which citizens this applies to and which citizens it does not.

The Minister of Labor and Social Affairs clarified that the pensions of approximately 600,000 citizens will increase by exactly 10,000 drams. “In the other segment, there are people in whose case the increase is even more than10,000. And here is an explanation of what this is due to. Pensions are calculated using different formulas, and there are pensioners of long-term military service, where the formula is slightly different. There we change two indicators, and as a result, it turns out that in the case of many servicemen, for example, the pension will increase by 15,000 drams. We have cases where the rise is even more, and very few cases, whose pension is already higher than 90,000 drams, it will increase, say, by 5, 6, 7 thousand drams."

Arsen Torosyan added: “Those citizens to whom we say that the average pension is not increasing by exactly 10,000, now the average pension is 96,000, after that increase it will become 105,000, that is, it still increases by an average of 8,500 drams, but everyone else's increases by exactly 10,000.”

Addressing the question of whether the average pension with this increase will not be lower than the minimum expenditure basket, Arsen Torosyan noted: “According to our latest data, which is the third quarter of 2025, the minimum expenditure basket is 61,768 drams. Our average pension in the previous quarter, which has not yet been increased, is 49,451 drams. And with this new increase, it becomes 59,191 drams on average. That is, only the pension, without the back payment component, which we had increased again from January 1, is already approaching the minimum expenditure basket. But we also have a refund, which is actively spreading. We already have 415,000 citizens who receive that refund, and the average today is 7,000 drams. When we add 7,000 to 59,000, we already get 66,000 drams, which is 4,500 drams higher than the minimum expenditure basket."

In this context, it was also discussed about beneficiaries using cashless payments, it was emphasized that in January the number of beneficiaries had already reached 415,000 and it has a growing tendency. It was emphasized that in parallel with the increase in the average pension, the average amount of the refund is also increasing, which is forecast to be 8,700 drams and the calculated 66,000 drams will be much higher in reality.

Speaking about the increase in pensions by 10,000 drams, the Prime Minister emphasized that according to the forecasts for 2025, economic growth should have been 5.1 percent, but it was 7.2 percent. And the increase in pensions is a concrete numerical expression of economic growth.