For the first 42 days, we hold your pension contributions for you but don’t invest them. This is so we can give you a refund if you opt out of the pension scheme in the first calendar month.

After this time period has passed (and providing your employer has paid in your contributions) we’ll begin to invest your money. You’ll see this reflected on your Online Account transactions page.

How does tax relief show on my Online Account?

This depends on how your employer deducts your contributions from your pay – whether before or after tax has been deducted. You can find more information on this here.

What if your pension contributions on your Online Account don’t match your payslip?

Your pension contributions will show alongside the date your employer has sent them to us. This doesn’t always match the date they deducted contributions from your pay. Many employers work in arrears, ie linked to the previous pay period rather than the current pay period – so it’s worth checking if your contributions match your payslip from the month before.

If you have any questions about what you’re paying into the scheme, your payroll department should be able to assist. As your employer is responsible for working out your contributions and sending them to us, we wouldn’t be able to adjust this for you if you feel it’s incorrect.

Check your contributions are correct

You can check what contributions you should be making under qualifying earnings by using MoneyHelper’s workplace pension contribution calculator.

If you have any questions about what you’re paying into the scheme, your payroll department should be able to assist.

The People’s Pension is not a defined benefit scheme, it’s a defined contribution pension scheme instead. This means you and/or your employer have been steadily building up your own pension pot over the course of your employment. It’s your money, invested in your name. If your employer goes bust your money is held separately and won’t be available to your employer’s creditors. So, you’ll still have the pension pot you’ve been building up. Your money will be held on your behalf by the Trustee of The People’s Pension. Visit our webpage for more about how we keep your pension savings secure.

If your employer has gone bust, you’ll no longer receive contributions from them going forward. An Insolvency Practitioner will be responsible for gathering all the information on pension payments that your employer should’ve made before the insolvency date. If you wanted to take a small pot lump sum of under £10,000, we’d need to receive all the outstanding contributions first according to HM Revenue & Customs rules.

If you have a new employer, after your previous employer went bust, you can keep paying into your pension pot with The People’s Pension and your new employer may decide to pay into this as well. You can carry on contributing even if you change jobs and your new employer doesn’t or if you become self-employed. Find out how you can make personal payments into your pension.

However, in reality many employers actually base their contributions on the pre-sacrificed salary ie what the salary was if employees didn’t receive any childcare vouchers.

If you wish to use your redundancy pay to make pension contributions, you can up to your annual allowance (this would be an employee and not an employer contribution). Please note that if you’re under 75, you’re eligible to pay in up to 100% of your UK taxable earnings or up to £3,600 gross, whichever is higher, and receive tax relief on your contributions. However, only the redundancy payment over the tax-exempt threshold of £30,000 will be classed as employment income and therefore count as relevant UK earnings.

If you receive a late payments letter whilst on long term sick, please contact your employer to confirm whether they should still be making contributions for you (some employers will while you’re on long term sick leave, some employers won’t). If so, please ask them to make arrangements to pay your missed contributions. If not, please ask them to tell us what your contributions should be, so you don’t keep receiving reminder letters. These letters will continue to be sent to you while you’re an active member of the scheme and contributions are missed.

When you return to work your employer can start paying contributions for you again.

The annual allowance is the maximum you can pay into all of your pension plans combined before a tax charge applies. For the current tax year, the annual allowance is £60,000.

The maximum contribution could be in the form of regular payments, one-off lump sum or a combination of both. The limit includes the contributions paid into all of your pensions (if you have more than one), includes your personal contributions, tax relief and any contributions that are paid by your employer.

For more information about tax relief, please visit our pension tax webpage.

If for example you’re earning £15,000 then your employer would need to contribute £15,000 – £6,240 = £8,760 x 3% = £262.80 a year. This means that your employer’s minimum monthly contribution is £262.80/12 = £21.90.