Ukrainian pension documents abroad: OK-5, OK-7, insurance record, translations

Before paying to translate an OK-5 certificate, check one thing: whether the country where you are claiming a pension has a social security agreement with Ukraine. If it does, your translation is probably not needed at all, because the two institutions exchange bilingual liaison forms directly. If it does not, you assemble the file yourself — and then everything needs translating, from the register extract to the labour book. That single split decides the document list, the cost and the timeline, and it is almost never mentioned in the guides.

OK-5 and OK-7: what these certificates are

Both are generated from the register of insured persons held in Ukraine’s State Register of Compulsory State Social Insurance.

Certificate	Period	What it is asked for
OK-5	from 2000	wages, employers, contributions paid — the basis for awarding and recalculating a pension
OK-7	from 2011	insurance record: sick pay, unemployment benefit, confirming periods

You can obtain them through your account on the Pension Fund electronic services portal, in the Diia or Pensiinyi Fond apps, or in person at any Pension Fund service centre with your passport and tax number document. They contain personal data, so they are issued to the insured person, their legal representative, or a representative holding properly executed authority — a relative asking on your behalf will not be given one.

The limitation people discover too late: the register begins in 2000. Soviet-era and early post-Soviet service does not appear in OK-5 at all — it is evidenced by the labour book, employer certificates and archive certificates. That is the part of the file that takes longest to gather and costs the most to translate.

The main fork: agreement or no agreement

The Pension Fund maintains a list of bilateral social security agreements in force. It includes Poland (agreement of 18 May 2012, applied from 1 January 2014), Czechia, Slovakia, Estonia (agreement of 5 October 2010), Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Spain and Portugal. There is no agreement in force with Germany. The list changes, so check the Pension Fund’s international cooperation page before filing.

What an agreement gives you: insurance periods in both countries count towards entitlement to a pension. What it does not give you: a combined pension. Each state calculates and pays only for the periods earned on its own territory — ZUS says plainly that the Polish system does not fund a pension for Ukrainian employment, and the reverse is equally true.

If there is an agreement: the documents do not travel through you

This is the most valuable practical point in the topic. Under the agreement an application for a Polish pension can be filed through the Pension Fund office where you live in Ukraine — no trip to Poland required; you may also apply directly to ZUS or KRUS. Polish periods are confirmed for the Ukrainian file by form PL-UA 6, issued by ZUS rather than by you.

The conclusion follows: when the case moves through the official channel between institutions, bilingual forms take the place of a translation. People still order a notarized translation of OK-5 “just in case” — money thrown away.

So the order of operations is:

1. Ask the institution taking the application (Ukrainian or foreign) exactly which documents it wants from you personally.
2. Ask separately whether a translation is needed and in what form: an official liaison form, a certified translation, or simply a copy.
3. Order the translation only after both answers.

If there is no agreement: you assemble the file

The classic case is Germany. There is no liaison-form mechanism, so Deutsche Rentenversicherung works with whatever you submit. In practice that means:

• the extract from the register of insured persons (OK-5) on paper;
• evidence of periods before 2000: labour book, employer and archive certificates;
• an apostille where required, and almost always a certified German translation;
• a surname spelling aligned with the one in your German documents.

The same applies to any country with no agreement where the pension institution simply asks for documents “with a translation”. German, Czech and Slovak translation starts at UAH 450 per page, Polish at UAH 430, English at UAH 300; notarial certification is UAH 400 per document. Current figures are always on the prices page.

One caveat: institutions in Poland and Czechia often want a sworn translation done on their own register, and a Ukrainian notarized translation does not always substitute for it. How that works for Poland is set out in when you need a sworn translator.

What else gets asked for besides OK-5

• The labour book. Translated in full, every entry and stamp. Soviet-era entries are often in Russian, and the translator has to render enterprise names and job titles unambiguously.
• Archive certificates. Where the employer was liquidated, the archive evidences the service. Such a certificate may include extracts from orders — separate pages and separate cost.
• A certificate that no Ukrainian pension has been awarded, or stating its amount. Often needed so that the foreign institution does not count a payment twice; issued by the regional Pension Fund office.
• Birth, marriage and divorce certificates. Needed where the surname in the service documents differs from your current one.

Apostille: the route and the paper original

An apostille goes on a paper document, so for legalization take the certificate from a Pension Fund service centre rather than only as a PDF. The apostille route for Pension Fund certificates is worth confirming — the most common working path runs through a notarized copy, because notarial documents are apostilled by the Ministry of Justice.

And the first question to ask is still whether an apostille is needed at all. Some pension institutions accept documents without one when they arrive through the official inter-institutional channel. Our apostille route finder will identify the route for a specific document, and the general logic is on the legalization and apostille page.

Names and dates: where pension cases stall

A pension file is the one place where forty years of surname spellings meet. The labour book holds the Soviet-era Russian form, the birth certificate the Ukrainian one, the passport a Latin transliteration, and German or Polish documents a local phonetic rendering.

To a pension institution those are four different people unless the connection is shown. So we do this: take the passport spelling as the anchor, tie every other document in the file to it, and show divergences explicitly. You can check your own spelling with our transliteration tool; where the mismatch is already baked into the documents, see name mismatch across documents.

Common mistakes

• Translating OK-5 before asking the institution. Where an agreement exists, the translation is often not needed at all.
• Assuming OK-5 covers the whole record. It starts in 2000; everything earlier lives in the labour book and the archives.
• Submitting only the portal PDF where an apostille is required. Apostilles go on paper.
• Ordering the translation before the apostille. The stamp is part of the document; the translation would have to be repeated.
• Translating the labour book selectively. The institution reads service continuously: a skipped page means skipped years.
• Expecting a “combined” pension under the agreement. It aggregates periods for entitlement; each country still pays only for its own.

What to do this week

1. Check on the Pension Fund site whether an agreement is in force with the country you need.
2. Order OK-5 and OK-7 through your portal account — free of charge — to see which periods the register actually shows.
3. List the periods before 2000 and work out who can evidence them: the employer, its legal successor, or an archive.
4. Write to the institution that will award the pension and ask exactly two things: which documents it wants from you, and in what form of translation.

Once you have their answer, send it to us — we will price the translation of what is genuinely required and tell you where you can skip it. Personal document translation starts at UAH 300 per page and notarized translation is UAH 400 per document; originals can travel by Nova Poshta, so a trip to Kyiv is optional. If you are preparing documents for Poland, see the destination overview for Poland; for Germany, see Germany.