How does a change in hours impact on my pension?
The Final Salary section (pension scheme membership until 31 March 2014) of your pension would not be affected by you changing your working hours, as long as you do not also have a change in your spinal column point (because the pay used for the calculation is a Whole Time Equivalent).
The CARE pension (pension built up after 1 April 2014) you build up to the date of the reduction will not be affected. In terms of the future build-up of CARE pension post a reduction in hours, however, you will see a slight slow-down in this after the reduction.
For example, a Whole-Time employee earning £27,041.00 per year. will see a build-up in their pension each year as follows:
1 / 49 x £27,041 = £551.86
Based on a reduction to a 4 day week that same employee would see the following build up:
Actual Pay = £27,041 x 4 / 5 = £21,632.80
Pension build-up = 1 / 49 x £21,632.80 = £441.49
What if my current hours appear wrong on My Pension Portal?
Since the change to a CARE scheme from the 1 April 2014, although we hold an accurate record of your contractual hours up until this point, we have not needed to reflect any hour changes on our records since. There is no need to contact the Pension Team to inform us that the hours we hold don’t currently reflect the hours that you work.
We are currently undergoing a project to collect hour change data from employers to cover the period from 1 April 2014, because some of the protections issued when the scheme changed on 1 April 2014 are being extended to cover all those who were in the scheme on 31 March 2014 (this is known as McCloud protections), but these have not yet been fully collected or implemented on records (as the revised protections are currently only in draft legislation and are not expected to be brought into the scheme until April 2023).
If you would like to check the pay information provided by your employer for the build up of your CARE pension, you should click the "Pension Account History" option in the Pension Benefits section of My Pension Portal from tjhe Dashboard. This will take you to the breakdown of the pension amounts that have been added to your account from 1 April 2014 (or the date you started if later). If you click into a single line you can then expand the section to see the full build up. The Pensionable Salary section shows the data that has been provided by your Employer or Payroll Provider. If you think any of this data is incorrect, you should contact your Employer in the first instance, as Pensions cannot amend this data without an instruction from your Employer.