What will your UK pension be?

PlainPension gives you a free interactive UK pension calculator and decision engine for the 2026/27 tax year. Enter your year of birth, salary, NI record, and contribution split — the calculator projects your State Pension entitlement at retirement age, your workplace Defined Contribution pot under employer-match plus tax relief, and (where applicable) your SIPP top-up balance year by year. The decision engine asks six short questions about your goal, age, tax band, and access timing, then recommends a State + Workplace + SIPP / ISA mix with the reasoning shown line by line.

For the 2026/27 tax year (effective 2026-04-06), the full new State Pension is £240.30 per week, which works out to £12,495.6 per year. The uprating from 2025/26 reflects the triple-lock formula (the higher of CPI, earnings growth, or 2.5%). To receive the full amount, you need 35 qualifying years of National Insurance contributions or credits. You need a minimum of 10 qualifying years to receive any State Pension at all. The actual amount you get is your share of 35 — so 30 years gets you 30/35 of the full rate.

The standard pension Annual Allowance for 2026/27 is £60,000. This is the maximum you and your employer can contribute to all your pensions in one tax year while still receiving tax relief at your marginal rate. Above the allowance you owe an Annual Allowance Charge at your marginal income-tax rate on the excess. The allowance tapers down by £1 for every £2 of "adjusted income" above £260,000, all the way down to a floor of £10,000 for the highest earners. If you have already flexibly accessed a Defined Contribution pension, the Money Purchase Annual Allowance (MPAA) of £10,000 replaces the standard allowance for further DC contributions.

For nearly every employee in the UK, the workplace pension comes first. The reason is the employer match. Under auto-enrolment, your employer must contribute a minimum of 3% of qualifying earnings while you contribute 5%. The employer contribution is free money: you cannot replicate it inside a SIPP. Most workers should fully capture the workplace employer match before opening a SIPP. SIPPs make sense after the match is maxed (especially for higher-rate taxpayers consolidating multiple old workplace pots into one investment-flexible wrapper), for the self-employed (who have no workplace scheme), and for anyone wanting investment choice well beyond the workplace default fund. The decision engine quantifies the trade-off using your specific salary, employer scheme, and tax band.