UK Pension Annual Allowance Calculator 2026/27

The standard annual allowance for the 2026/27 tax year is £60,000. This is the maximum total pension saving you can make in a year, counting your own contributions, your employer’s contributions and the growth in any defined benefit pension, before an annual allowance charge applies. High earners can have this reduced to as little as £10,000 by the taper, and anyone who has flexibly accessed a defined contribution pension is limited to £10,000 of money purchase saving.

Two tests must both be failed before the taper applies. Your threshold income must exceed £200,000 and your adjusted income must exceed £260,000. If either test is passed, you keep the full £60,000. Where both are exceeded, your allowance falls by £1 for every £2 of adjusted income above £260,000, down to a floor of £10,000, which is reached once adjusted income reaches £360,000.

Threshold income is broadly your net income before any pension contributions are added back, minus the gross amount of any relief-at-source contributions, plus anything you gave up under a salary sacrifice arrangement entered into after 8 July 2015. Adjusted income takes your net income and adds back all pension saving, including contributions deducted under a net pay arrangement and everything your employer paid in. Adjusted income is therefore almost always the larger of the two.

No. Salary sacrifice arrangements entered into after 8 July 2015 are added back to threshold income precisely to stop this. Sacrifice arrangements that predate 8 July 2015 are not added back, which is why the date of the arrangement matters. Sacrifice still helps with National Insurance and with the £100,000 personal allowance taper, but it does not remove you from the annual allowance taper.

The floor is £10,000, reached when adjusted income is £360,000 or more. The maximum reduction is therefore £50,000. This floor has applied since 6 April 2023, when it was raised from £4,000 at the same time as the standard allowance rose from £40,000 to £60,000.

You can carry forward unused allowance from the three previous tax years. For 2026/27 that means 2023/24, 2024/25 and 2025/26, each of which had a standard allowance of £60,000 before any taper. You must use the current year’s allowance in full first, then draw on the oldest year available, working forward. You must also have been a member of a registered pension scheme in each year you carry forward from, although you did not need to contribute in that year.

Yes. Carry forward works in exactly the same way, except that you substitute your tapered allowance for the standard figure in each affected year. So someone with a £10,000 tapered allowance this year and three earlier years of unused allowance can still make a substantial contribution. What carry forward cannot do is get around the money purchase annual allowance.

Not for your own contributions. Tax relief on personal contributions is capped at the higher of £3,600 gross or 100% of your relevant UK earnings for the year in which you pay them, and carry forward does not lift that cap. Employer contributions are not restricted by your earnings, which is why owner-managers often fund a catch-up from the company rather than personally. This calculator flags personal contributions that exceed the earnings limit.

Any pension saving above your available allowance is added to your taxable income for the year and taxed at your marginal rate, as though it were the top slice of your income. For a 2026/27 additional-rate taxpayer that is 45%, so a £35,000 excess produces a £15,750 charge. Because the excess sits on top of everything else, an excess can straddle two rate bands, which this calculator models rather than applying a single flat rate.

Sometimes, and this is where many high earners are caught out. You can compel a scheme to pay under mandatory scheme pays only if your charge for the year exceeds £2,000 and your pension input to that one scheme exceeds the standard £60,000 annual allowance. HMRC ignores your tapered figure for this test. So someone with a £10,000 tapered allowance and a £50,000 input owes a large charge but cannot force the scheme to settle it, and must find the cash personally unless the scheme agrees to a voluntary arrangement.

For a mandatory scheme pays election you must give notice to your scheme by 31 July in the year following the year in which the tax year ended. For the 2026/27 tax year, which ends on 5 April 2027, the deadline is 31 July 2028. Voluntary scheme pays runs to the scheme’s own timetable, which is usually much earlier, so it is worth asking well before the statutory date.

Once you have flexibly accessed a defined contribution pension, for example by taking taxable income from drawdown, your money purchase saving is limited to £10,000 a year and carry forward cannot be used against it. Any defined benefit accrual is then measured against the alternative annual allowance, which is your annual allowance less £10,000. Taking even a small flexible withdrawal can therefore cost far more than it raises if you intend to keep contributing.

Yes. If your pension saving exceeds your available allowance you must report the excess on a Self Assessment return, even where the scheme is paying the charge for you. Your scheme should send you a pension savings statement automatically if your input to it exceeded £60,000, but it will not know about your other schemes or about your taper, so the responsibility for getting the total right is yours.

It is not the contribution paid. The input is the increase in the capital value of your promised benefits over the year, calculated as the closing value less the opening value uprated by inflation, with the annual pension multiplied by a factor of 16 and any separate lump sum added. A modest-looking pay rise on a long service record can generate a very large input, which is a common cause of unexpected annual allowance charges among senior public sector and professional staff.

Article 18(5) of the US–UK treaty generally allows a US citizen resident in the United Kingdom to exclude UK employer contributions and to deduct their own contributions, so that a UK pension is treated broadly like a US plan. Crucially, the relief cannot exceed the limits the United States would allow for a corresponding US scheme. For 2026 those are $24,500 of elective deferrals and $72,000 of total annual additions, so a large UK contribution can spill past the treaty ceiling.

No, and this is the trap. Carry forward is a purely UK concept with no equivalent in the US rules, which apply their limits year by year. A client who uses three years of unused allowance to make a single large catch-up contribution can be entirely within the UK rules while breaching the US annual limits for that year, which makes the excess taxable income on the US return with no matching UK tax to credit against it.

If you pay the charge personally it is a UK income tax and can generally go on Form 1116. However, the pension saving it relates to was usually excluded from US income under Article 18(5), so the credit tends to produce excess foreign tax credits rather than a real cash saving. If the scheme pays the charge instead, you have paid no UK tax personally and there is nothing to credit at all, which is a point worth weighing before choosing scheme pays.

Often yes, but the answer depends on your carry forward position, whether the excess would be taxed at 40% or 45%, and whether an employer contribution is worth more to you than the equivalent salary. For a US citizen there is a further layer, because the treaty ceiling and the reporting of the pension can change the answer entirely. Model the figures here first, then take advice before committing a large contribution.

The annual allowance, the taper thresholds and the carry forward rules are the same throughout the United Kingdom, because pensions tax is not devolved. However, the annual allowance charge is collected at the taxpayer’s own marginal income tax rate, so a Scottish taxpayer pays it at Scottish rates. The charge shown here uses the rates for England, Wales and Northern Ireland and should be treated as indicative for Scottish residents.