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Pension consolidation can be pretty easy these days. A modern pension provider (company) will handle the whole pension consolidation service for you – all you need to do is let them know where your old pensions are, and they’ll handle the rest. We’ve got all the best options below.
Got a few pensions lying around collecting dust? It’s often a good idea to consolidate (combine) your pensions into one pension pot – the key reason being that you won’t forget about it when the time comes to retire…
As much as £26.6 billion is lost in over 2.8 million pensions (ABI), that’s a lot, and it’s growing every year. You don’t want to be part of that statistic – when the time comes to retire, your pension provider (company) probably won’t get in touch to remind you they’ve still got lots of your cash either (they’d typically rather keep it and keep earning their fee).
It’s a great idea to take charge of your pension now, so not only will you not lose it, but by combining your pensions, they could grow quicker, you might get lower fees, and you get to choose a top rated pension provider (we’ll cover the benefits in more detail below).
To help you pick one of those great pension providers to combine pensions, we’ve done the hard work and researched which ones are great at consolidating pensions, and also growing your money much more over time. And here they are…
No need to worry about a thing, the experts will handle it all.
We recommend PensionBee, the customer service is great, and they’ll handle everything for you.
Get £50 added to your pension
PensionBee is our recommended provider – they’ve thought of everything.
Their 5 star rated app (and website) makes it easy to set up and use. You can open a brand new pension, or transfer your existing pensions across (they’ll handle all the paperwork).
Simply pick from an easy to understand range of pension plans, and that’s it, the experts manage everything from there.
It’s low cost, with one simple annual fee. The customer service is excellent, and you’ll get a dedicated account manager for any questions you might have.
And, when the time comes to retire, withdrawing from your pension is easy too.
You can also use them if you're self-employed or a company director.
Moneyfarm is a great option for saving and investing (both ISAs and pensions). It's easy to use and their experts can help you with any questions or guidance you need.
They have one of the top performing investment records, and great socially responsible investing options too. Plus, you can save cash and get a high interest rate.
The fees are low, and reduce as you save more. Plus, the customer service is outstanding.
We recommend PensionBee, the customer service is great, and they’ll handle everything for you.
Consolidating your pension (bringing all your pensions together into a single pot), has a lot of benefits, and is a very popular thing to do. Let’s run through it.
First of all, and the most important, you never have to worry about forgetting where your old pensions are, which happens a lot more than you might think! Don’t forget, you could be many years (decades) away from retiring, and your memory might not be what it is now.
Combining all your pensions together means there’s less chance you’ll forget about them, and if you combine them with a great modern pension provider, it will all be online (or on an app on your phone), so no chance of any paperwork getting lost.
If you’re not sure where to find a great modern pension provider, check out PensionBee¹, it’s easy to use, has low fees, and they’ll take care of everything to do with combining your pensions, with a great mobile app to boot.
You probably shop around for the best phone deal, or your energy provider, but did you know you can shop around for the best pension provider too? Meaning you could save a hefty wedge (potentially much more than on your phone or energy bill).
When combining pensions, you’ll be able to choose which pension provider you want to consolidate your pensions with – so you can pick one that might have lower fees than your existing pensions.
So, by moving your old pension savings over to a pension with lower fees, you can potentially save lots of cash over time.
And on top of that, some of the great pension providers will reduce their fees when you have more saved with them (PensionBee¹ and Moneyfarm¹ to name a couple), so you really can save a small fortune with a growing pension pot.
Nuts About Money tip: although fees are super important, make sure you consider other things too, such as if it’s easy to use, have great customer service, and things you might find important such as a great mobile app.
When your money is sitting in a pension waiting for you to retire, it’s actually being invested (usually sensibly over a long period) so it can grow much more over time.
As you get to pick the best pension provider, when consolidating your pensions, you can also pick one that could potentially grow much more than your current ones (or more suited to your financial goals).
You’ll get to pick a pension plan (where your pension is invested) that is suited to how you’d like your pension to grow, which can often be letting the experts handle things, and to grow it sensibly over time.
Your current pensions might not be doing much growing where they are – and they might be with a provider with a poor track record of growing pensions over time. Now, you get to pick one that has a great record, which might continue into the future.
Making sure your retirement savings are growing in the right way for long-term growth can have a huge impact on your total pension pot by the time you retire, trust us!
Again, sorry to keep bringing it up, but great modern pension providers can be a breath of fresh air compared to the old stuffy pension companies you probably have your old pensions with.
With modern pension providers, you can often track your pensions either on a flashy mobile app, or online, so you can check how much your pension is growing any time you like, and you can make top ups directly in the app, any use other great tools such as pension calculators, helping you plan and save much better for retirement.
As a reminder, our favourite modern provider is check out PensionBee¹, for all of those reasons – plus we’ve bagged you £50 added to your pension if you sign up with Nuts About Money. For all the top options, check out the best pension providers.
Consolidating your pension sooner rather than later also makes it much easier to access your money when the time comes to retire (or withdraw some of your money after 55 years old). Your money will all be in one place, so you’ll know exactly how much you’ve got, and will only have to speak to one pension company to let them know what you want to do with it at retirement.
When you do retire, you can typically opt for a pension drawdown, which is leaving it where it is so it can keep growing, and you simply withdraw from it as and when you like (e.g. monthly) – a modern pension provider that offers drawdown is important here too (not many do offer it).
Or, you can opt to buy a pension annuity, which is a guaranteed retirement income for the rest of your life (or a set number of years).
With either option, you’ll want to pool all your pension pots together – so you’ll need to consolidate your pension pots eventually anyway.
You can learn lots more about either option with our guide to drawdown vs annuity.
Finally, when you sadly pass away, you’ll be saving your family a lot of stress and paperwork. If your family only has to deal with one pension provider to access your pension, it can make things much easier (they will be going through an emotional time as it is).
Saving into your pension is also free from Inheritance Tax, which is a tax your family might pay on your estate (all of your things and money added together), if the value is over £325,000, and the tax is typically 40%.
If you pass away before the age of 75, your pension will be passed to your family tax-free too. After 75, they might pay Income Tax on it (the same as their salary), depending on their income and how much they withdraw.
Have we already mentioned it’s super easy to consolidate your pension? As it is!
All you need to do is find a great new pension provider, and they take care of everything.
Although there is one thing you need to do, which is let them know where your old pensions are. That’s it. They’ll get in touch with your old provider, and handle the whole transfer process. Your money will turn up in your new pension pot after a few weeks (sometimes a few months).
If you have forgotten where your pensions are, don’t worry. Try the government’s pension tracing service, or Gretel, a free service to find lost pensions.
Again, if you want to consolidate your pension, check out PensionBee¹, it’s easy to use, has low fees, and great customer service. There’s also Moneyfarm¹, who can provide expert advice if you’d like it. Or, for all the top options, check out the best pension providers.
We recommend PensionBee, the customer service is great, and they’ll handle everything for you.
If you’re employed, you’ll likely have a pension from your work, called a workplace pension. These are set up by your employer, and you’ll pay in directly from your salary.
With most workplace pension schemes, you can transfer your old pensions over to your current one if you want to – and some people do this when they change jobs.
However, it’s not always the best idea to do this – as once your old pensions are with your new work pension, they’re stuck there – you’re not able to transfer your existing workplace pension to another pension provider (until you leave that job).
And typically, workplace pensions aren’t the best ones out there – some can have high fees, slow pension growth, bad customer service, poor websites and no mobile phone app to track your pension when you want to.
(Employers often just pick any pension scheme to tick the box, rather than shopping around for the best one, as it’s a legal requirement to offer employees a pension.)
If you opt for a personal pension, which is a pension you open yourself, rather than your employer, you get to choose from all the best pension providers – and you have the flexibility to transfer your pension to another provider in the future, whenever you like. Pretty great right?
By the way, once you consolidate your pension, you can keep paying into it – and you’ll likely want to, as these days, you’ll need a pretty hefty pension pot for a comfortable retirement.
There’s 3 retirement standards to guide how much you’ll need as an income when you retire: minimum, moderate and comfortable…
The minimum standard just covers the essentials, such as food and bills, with pretty much nothing left over to spend on yourself. Moderate is a bit more for bills, and you can stretch to a cheap holiday once per year. Comfortable is even more for bills, and a nicer holiday, and things such as a new(ish) car.
Learn more about these on the Retirement Living Standards website, but as an overview, here's how much income you’ll need in retirement, and how much you’ll need in your pension pot for that income.
By the way, the State Pension (the government pension) is factored into the pension pot figure, so this is what you need to save in addition to the State Pension – we’ll cover the State Pension below.
Ouch. Quite a lot isn’t it? But don’t panic just yet, pensions are pretty great at growing your money over time – the main thing is to get saving as much as you can, and over time it will grow and grow and grow.
It’s all down to something called compound interest, which is where the money you make, begins to make money too, and this snowballs over and over.
In fact, if you had a pension pot of currently £10,000, and were able to save £220 into it each month, and it also grew at 7% per year, after 25 years you’d have a whopping £235,470!
And 10 years after that, it would double to £511,294. And then just one year after that it would make £35,791 in just one year.
Can you see how pensions are pretty great given time? Those big pension pots don’t seem as big now do they?
There’s more benefits with personal pensions too (a pension you set up yourself to consolidate pensions). Just like a workplace pension, where your money goes into your pension tax-free, personal pensions are also tax-free…
As you’ll be topping up your pension after you've got paid (so have already paid tax), you’ll actually get a massive 25% bonus from the government on all the money you add to your personal pension. We’re not joking!
This is to refund the tax you’ve already paid at 20% basic rate tax (it seems odd but the maths works out).
And if you pay higher rate tax (40%) or additional rate tax (45%) you can claim some of that back too – done on a Self Assessment tax return.
Your money also grows tax-free too – so there’s no tax to worry about until it’s time to retire. Which means your money can grow much more over time, and there's no boring paperwork to sort out either.
When you retire (or want to withdraw money after 55 years old), 25% of your pension will be completely tax-free, and you can take this as a tax-free lump sum if you like (all in one go).
With the remaining 75%, you might pay Income Tax on it, it depends on your income at the time.
Before you go putting all your cash into a pension (although you should probably seriously consider it!), there are some limits to be aware of.
Each tax year (April 6th to April 5th the following year), you can only save as much as your total income (e.g. your salary), or £60,000, whichever is lower. And that applies as a total across all of your pensions (so includes your workplace pension too).
Note: transferring and combining pensions doesn’t count towards this figure, just new money added.
You also won’t be able to access your money until you’re at least 55 years old (57 from 2028), and it’s often a good idea to keep it in there so it can keep growing until you’re really ready to retire.
We recommend PensionBee, the customer service is great, and they’ll handle everything for you.
By the way, we’re talking about defined contribution pensions, which is where you save money directly into a pension pot, either personally or through your work, and this builds up over time until you’re ready to retire.
However, there’s also another type of pension called a defined benefit pension, and they’re a bit different. They’re common in government jobs, and places like the NHS.
With a defined benefit pension, you'll still save each month (taken from your salary), but at retirement, you’ll typically get a set amount each month guaranteed for the rest of your life. The amount you’ll actually get in retirement can depend on things like how long you’ve worked at your job, and what your salary was. These can sometimes be called final salary pensions, or average salary pensions.
As the benefits are normally pretty good, such as the guaranteed income, often it’s not a good idea to transfer or consolidate these to a defined contribution pension scheme – you can simply leave them where they are. Although it can be a great idea to speak to a financial advisor to run through all of your options.
You’ll likely get the State Pension when you retire, which is the pension from the government. You’ll get this at State Pension age (currently 66), and if you’ve paid at least 10 years worth of National Insurance contributions over your working life, but 35 years to get the full amount.
The full amount is currently only £221.20 per week, or £11,502 per year. So it’s not enough to cover the essentials for most people, and shouldn’t be relied on – you really need to be saving into a private pension too (your own pension, either a personal pension, workplace pension, or ideally both).
There we have it. Combining pensions is not as complicated as it first seems right? All you need to do is pick a great pension consolidation service.
With that in mind, our top recommendation is PensionBee¹, it’s easy to use, has low fees, great customer service, and they’ll handle the whole pension consolidation process. You’ll also get £50 added to your pension when you sign up with Nuts About Money.
We also think Moneyfarm¹ is pretty great, and they’ll handle the whole process too, and expert advice on hand if you’d like it. For all the top options, check out the best pension providers.
Before you head off, we also recommend saving as much as you can into your pension going forward (ideally monthly), you’ll need a very big pension pot these days to afford a comfortable retirement. Having said that, if you keep saving into your pension, it can grow pretty big over time. Remember you get a 25% government bonus and it grows tax-free!
That's it! All the best saving for your future.
Edward Savage is a leading expert on money, with a background of 8 years working in financial services in London, has a business, accounting and finance degree, runs an investing community, and teaches people about money. He writes about all aspects of personal finance, including pensions, investing, mortgages and insurance.
This article was written, reviewed and fact checked by the expert team at Nuts About Money. You’re in safe hands. Learn more.
We're experts in all things pensions, with many years of combined experience writing and talking about pensions and retirement, and some of our team were top financial advisors with professional pension qualifications. We love writing about pensions, they’re pretty much the best thing you can do for your future.
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We recommend PensionBee, the customer service is great, and they’ll handle everything for you.
