The period of exiting from once full-time years of daily employment to a period of less time constraint can be a period of excitement or misery in poverty. It is pathetic that at one period, an individual is on a payroll of an employer but at another period the individual is not on any pension roll. The objective of the paper is to examine the qualification criteria for a pension and the effect of a pension type on poverty. Primary data was gathered from residences with at least one person aged 60 years old or older across 24 sampled localities in the country. A logistic regression estimation method was employed for the data analyses. The findings of the study indicate that different pension systems have different qualifying criteria that the individual must satisfy to be able to get the monthly pension. The conceptual framework indicates that although some individuals contributed to the SSNIT pension scheme, they could not qualify for the monthly pension due to the inability to satisfied the minimum number of months. The findings also show that the SSNIT pension recipients household were less likely of being poor compared to the CAP30 pensioners. It is recommended that SSNIT should embark on vigorous awareness creation exercise to educate the general public about the tenets of social security pension.