Annual Benefit Statement (ABS)
Your Annual Benefit Statement (ABS) is issued annually and shows an estimate of your pension benefits, up to 31 March of the current year. The estimate is based on information provided by your employer.
Your Annual Benefit Statement (ABS) is issued annually and shows an estimate of your pension benefits, up to 31 March of the current year. The estimate is based on information provided by your employer.
If you don’t yet have a Pension Portal account
You'll need to register for your Pension Portal account. Registering is easy and only takes a few minutes. Read or watch our helpful guide to registering for the Pension Portal to get set up.
Each month, your employer will deduct pension contributions from your pensionable earnings (salary including pensionable allowances and bonuses). Your contributions are used to cover the cost of the pension scheme. The full amount does not go into your pension.
See the current contribution rates and pay bands.
alpha - your statement estimate is the total pension you have built up as of 31 March. This is based on 2.32% of your pensionable earnings each year.
Find out more about how your alpha pension is calculated in the alpha scheme guide.
nuvos - your statement estimate is the total pension you have built up as of 31 March. This is based on 2.3% of your pensionable earnings each year.
Find out more about how your nuvos pension is calculated in the scheme guide.
Find out more about how changes in working patterns can affect your pension.
We use the following to produce your statement:
The following don’t count as reckonable service:
Part-time service will be calculated on pro-rata basis.
This means your reckonable service could be lower than your total qualifying service (the total amount of time you’ve served in your current Civil Service employment).
Find out more about how changes in working patterns can affect your pension.
Find out more about how your pension is calculated in your scheme guide.
If you’re a Pre-Fresh Start prison officer with reserved rights, your reckonable service is doubled after you’ve served more than 20 years. As a result, your qualifying service may be lower than your reckonable service.
Your statement should include any transferred in pension and added benefits, and only shows details of your current active service, including aggregated or linked service.
Any unclaimed pension or previous service that was not aggregated or linked, will not show on your statement. If you would like a current value for your unclaimed pension from previous Civil Service employment, contact us.
Your statement will only show reckonable service and pension from the day after you took partial retirement.
You must have more than 12 months of service to qualify for survivor’s benefits. If you have less than 12 months of service, your ABS will not include survivor's benefits.
If you are a man and you were in post before 1 June 1972, your service before that date will normally provide a widow’s pension equal to one third of your pension (unless you chose to pay increased contributions to increase this to half).
If you are a woman and were in post before 1 June 1987, you were only able to provide a widower’s pension if your husband was dependent on you.
We have published the most common queries on this page. We strongly advise you check here first.
Scheme guides that may answer lots of your questions can be found in the scheme guides.
Scheme guides
We receive a high volume of queries about Annual Benefit Statements and aim to answer all of them by March 2024.
For questions about your ABS not listed on this page, please get in touch using our Online Contact Form.
Please contact your employer’s HR department or Shared Service Centre with any questions about your personal details, for example:
If you're due to retire or you're leaving the scheme, please follow the usual process. A full review of your record will take place at this point. You don't need to wait for a response from an ABS query.