Poverty alleviation of the elderly is one of the purposes of the pension. Poland conducted a systemic pension reform in 1999, where the DB pension formula is replaced by the DC one while the minimum pension is still offered. The article puts forward the following research question: to what degree does the minimum pension in the new system contribute to limitation of male and female old age pensioners’ poverty? Poverty has been operationalized as the level and depth and the assumed poverty line is absolute one. The basis for the conclusions are the microsimulations of the benefit levels based on the real parameters of men and women born between 1974 and 1981 who will receive the pension according to the new system. In accordance with the conducted analyses, the minimum pension in the present form mainly reduces women’s poverty (both in terms of level and depth). Raising the women’s retirement age by five years (thus equalising it with men’s) changes this situation only to a limited extent. Shortening the waiting period to ten years at the most (instead of twenty) for women seems to be the key decision to be taken in order to prevent poverty more effectively.
