My membership
Joining is easy, your employer will enroll you, providing you meet a few criteria.
We set you up with your own pension. Your pension builds up each month, and is ready for you to take when you are.
How you become a member
You'll usually be enrolled in PB Classic when you start your job, or within three months, if:
- you're aged between 22 and State Pension Age, and
- your salary is above the Government's ‘earnings trigger’
This process is called ‘auto-enrolment’. If you don't meet these criteria, your employer might still enrol you. If you're unsure, check with your employer.
Opting out
You're not required to join. You can opt out, but it is important you consider the benefits you will lose.
If you opt out, employer contributions will stop. You will also lose your life cover. If you want to opt out, contact us for an ‘opt out notice.’
We cannot send this to your employer, you must ask for this. This is designed to stop your employer pressuring you to opt-out.
Even if you opt out, your employer may enroll you in the future as part of auto-enrolment. You can opt out again if that happens.
Opting back in
If you change your mind after opting out, you can re-join. To opt back in, contact your employer for an ‘opt in notice.’
Transferring in
We do not accept transfers in.
Other pensions with the Church of England
If you have a pension with us from other employment within the Church, we need to keep these separate. We cannot combine pensions together. We need to do this so we charge the correct employers the correct amounts.
How my pension works
Every month, your pension contributions buy you a guaranteed amount of pension income for your retirement. The more you contribute, the more pension income you build up.
You can either take this pension when you retire or move it to another pension provider.
To figure out how much pension your contributions buy, a system of "conversion factors" is used. These factors change each year based on financial conditions.
The amount of pension you get depends on your age at the start of the year - older people generally get slightly less pension per £100 because it is expected to be invested for less time. Here is an example of what £100 might buy at a range of ages.
How much might my pension be?
This depends on:
- how much is paid in,
- the conversion factors we use to turn your contributions into guaranteed pension,
- how much discretionary increases are added, and
- when you decide to retire (early or late).
As we do not know what these three things will be, it is not easy to say what your final pot will be. But, each year we'll upload an annual statement to PensionsOnline, letting you know how much we think your pension might be when you retire.