NHS Pension Annual Allowance Calculator

It answers one question: do you owe an annual allowance charge for 2026/27, and if so, how much. You enter the pension input amounts from your pension savings statement and your income, and it works through the taper, three years of carry forward, the charge itself, and whether you can hand the bill to the scheme instead of paying it from your own pocket.

It is built for the case that catches GPs out (a pay rise or a partnership change inflating one year’s pension growth), and it shows its workings at every step, because a charge you cannot explain is a charge you cannot check. For the background theory, read the annual allowance guide.

• Your pension input amount. Taken from your statement, per arrangement. The 1995/2008 section and the 2015 scheme are kept separate throughout, because NHSBSA tests them separately. A negative input is floored at zero rather than netted off another arrangement.
• The two income measures. Threshold income decides whether the taper is tested at all, above £200,000. Adjusted income decides how much allowance you lose. Both start from net income before the personal allowance, which is why relief-at-source contributions and post-2015 salary sacrifice are asked for separately.
• The taper. The £60,000 allowance falls by £1 for every £2 of adjusted income above £260,000, stopping at £10,000 once adjusted income reaches £360,000. The workings are shown, not just the answer.
• Carry forward. Unused allowance from the three previous years is applied oldest first. Membership at any point in a year is the test, not whether you contributed, a deferred or pensioner year still carries forward. And an earlier year’s unused allowance is reduced by any later year that already ate into it, which is the step a simple “allowance minus input” sum gets wrong.
• The charge. The excess is stacked on top of your taxable income and taxed band by band, so a charge straddling two rates is split rather than being taxed at one guessed rate. Scotland’s bands are handled separately, and the blended effective rate is shown.
• Scheme Pays. Mandatory Scheme Pays needs a charge above £2,000 and is tested per scheme; the NHS voluntary route has no minimum. You get the election deadline and the boxes to fill in on your tax return.

A GP in England with £220,000 of net income and £70,000 of pension growth in the 2015 scheme. A big year, the kind a pay rise produces. These are the figures the calculator returns:

• Threshold income is £220,000, above the £200,000 limit, so the taper is tested. Adjusted income is £290,000, £30,000 over the limit, so the allowance drops by half of that, £15,000, to £45,000.
• Pension growth of £70,000 exceeds that allowance, but £15,000 of unused allowance is available from the three previous years and £15,000 of it is used.
• That leaves a taxable excess of £10,000, which lands in the additional rate band at 45%. The charge is £4,500, an effective rate of 45% on the excess.
• Because the charge exceeds £2,000, mandatory Scheme Pays is available: the scheme can pay it in exchange for a permanent reduction in the pension, with an election deadline of 31 July 2028.

Note how much of the bill the carry forward absorbed. Without it the excess would have been £25,000 rather than £10,000, which is why the three prior years are worth digging out of old statements.

None of this is tax advice, and the gaps matter:

• It does not work out your pension input amount. That comes from your pension savings statement. NHSBSA issues one automatically if your NHS growth alone exceeds the standard allowance, but if you are tapered, or your growth is split across schemes, you may have to ask.
• The money purchase annual allowance. If you have flexibly accessed a defined contribution pot, a lower allowance applies to your money purchase savings and this calculator does not apply it.
• McCloud remedy years. If you have had a remedial pension savings statement covering 2015 to 2022, your position for those years is recalculated and must be reported through HMRC’s own service. See the McCloud remedy guide.
• England & Wales scheme references. The pension scheme tax references it gives you are the England and Wales NHS schemes. Scotland’s SPPA and the Northern Ireland scheme have their own, though Scottish tax rates are supported.
• Lifetime allowance successors. The lump sum and death benefit allowances are a separate regime and are not modelled here.