Help and support
FAQs for Members
Annual Benefit Statement FAQs
If you haven’t accessed your benefit statement before you’ll need to set up your benefit statement account.
- Go to statements.nowpensions.com
- Enter your user ID <xxxxxx> and your temporary password. This is your National Insurance number, which you can find on your payslip. It’s in the following format: QQ123456C.
- You’ll be prompted to re-enter the user ID and your temporary password. You’ll then be asked to create a new password. This should have at least eight characters, including a mix of upper- and lower-case letters, numbers and a special character such as !, ?, @, or $.
- When you’ve done this, the website will return to the login page. You’ll need to log in again with your new password. In future, you’ll only need your user ID and new password to log in.
If you’ve already set up your benefit statement account, please do the following:
- Go to: statements.nowpensions.com and enter your user ID <xxxxxx> and password. Remember, your password is case-sensitive. If you’ve forgotten your password, go to ‘Click reset forgotten password’ and set up a new one.
- Go to the ‘Menu’ button, then ‘New Document’. Select ‘View’ to open and read your benefit statement.
Starting 10 years before your target retirement age – the age you’ve told us you want to retire at – we gradually switch most of your pension savings to our Retirement Countdown Fund. This fund aims to protect the value of your pension savings, reducing the risk of them falling in value when you’re due to turn them into retirement benefits.
This is an investment approach known as lifestyling. It’s designed to:
- grow your pension savings over most of your working life, then
- protect the value of those built-up pension savings as you approach your planned retirement age.
We call this switch from growth to protection investments your ‘lifecycle’.
The lifecycle is designed to protect your pension savings from ups and downs as you approach your planned retirement age. It’s automatic – you don’t have to make any decisions or take any action yourself. We move your savings gradually to protect against them all being moved if markets are low.
The timing of the investment switching may not be appropriate if you want to take your benefits before or after your planned retirement age. So, it’s important that you keep us updated if your planned retirement date changes. Unless you tell us otherwise, we assume your planned retirement date is your State Pension age
We explain this in more detail in our Member Booklet.
You can find out more about our investment strategy in our Statement of Investment Principles.
Yes. These charges are the same for all members, whether you’re:
- an active member contributing to your pension regularly, or
- a deferred member – you’ve stopped contributing but still have pension savings in the Scheme.
We send you an annual benefit statement that explains the value of your pension savings with us, including the costs and charges that apply.
Your fund value is the total amount of money in your pension savings with us at a particular point in time.
Your transfer value is the amount of money you can transfer out (take it out of the Scheme and move it to another pension provider).
Defined contribution pensions, like our Scheme, go up and down in value depending on the performance of the investments it uses. This affects the fund value and the transfer value.
The fund value is updated each week, usually on a Friday or Saturday. You can check the latest value online by logging in to your Gateway member account: nowgateway.com.
The transfer value is the value of your pension savings on the date you transfer them out of the Scheme. If you ask for a transfer value quote, it will be an estimate based on your fund value at the time of the quote and isn’t guaranteed. This is because investment values change all the time, so it’s not possible to know exactly what the value of your pension will be in advance.
Your contributions are invested in funds which aim to give a good return over the medium to long term. In the short term investments can go up or down in value, similar to how the stock market goes up or down.
Because of this, there may be times when your charges are higher than your investment growth. The chances of this happening will reduce as your pension savings increase in value.
When you and your employer pay contributions into your workplace pension, we invest them on your behalf for your future.
We want you to get the best possible return for your hard-earned pension savings – so we have a well-researched ‘pension saving journey’ designed to give you good value for money and positive long-term outcomes.
- to help them grow over time
- to protect their value as you get closer to retirement, and
- in ways that benefit the environment and our society.
We don’t ask you to make any investment decisions. Instead, the now:pensions Trustee takes responsibility for our investment strategy in consultation with its advisers. We believe this gives you the reassurance of knowing that your investments are being managed by professionals who have your long-term savings needs in mind. You can find out more about our investment strategy and how we protect your savings.
These are our investment funds. You also can see the latest fund prices.
Our Diversified Growth Fund
During most of your working life, we invest your pension savings in our Diversified Growth Fund. This fund is designed to provide stable growth, above the rate of inflation, without too many ups and downs in value over the long term.
Our Retirement Countdown Fund
Starting 10 years before your target retirement age – the age you’ve told us you want to retire at – we gradually switch your pension savings to the Retirement Countdown Fund. This fund aims to protect the value of your pension savings, reducing the risk of them falling in value when you’re due to turn them into retirement benefits.
Unless you tell us otherwise, we assume your planned retirement date is your State Pension age. Please keep us updated if your plans change. Remember, you can change your target retirement date in your online member account.
If you want to know more about our investment policy, please see our Member Booklet or our Statement of Investment Principles.
We sometimes have to adjust the value of your pension savings to put right something that’s gone wrong because of an administrative error.
Adjustments to the value of your investments
If there’s a delay in processing your contributions, we can’t invest them on the date we should. This means your investment values could be lower or higher than they would have been without the delay.
Delays are usually caused by us receiving incomplete or missing payroll data – such as a missing date of birth or National Insurance number.
If this affects you, we’ve adjusted your investments to put them back to what they would have been if we’d been able to invest them on the right date. Their value could be lower or higher. As a result, your benefit statement may show an adjustment that is a refund or a debit.
How do you work out adjustments to investments?
After getting contributions and payroll data from your employer, we look at all your contributions to see if any of them have an investment date more than 22 days later than the date they should have been invested.
The investment funds are divided into equal-value units. The weekly price of each unit changes depending on the value of the investments in each fund.
We use your contributions and your employer’s contributions to buy these units. The number of units we can buy depends on the unit price at the date we buy them. When unit prices go down, each contribution buys more units. When unit prices go up, each contribution buys fewer units.
We’ve adjusted the value of your pension savings using the price we would have paid for the investment units if we’d bought them within the 22-day period.
- If the price of your units should have been higher, your adjustment will be a debit.
- If the price of your units should have been lower, your adjustment will be a refund.
Adjustments to charges
If we’ve found there’s an error in the charges you’ve paid, we’ll make an adjustment to put this right. This can be a refund or a debit.
How do you work out adjustments to charges?
We check to see if the right amount was taken from your account to cover the charges up to and including 31 March. (We’ve checked this each month since your first contribution.)
These are the checks we make.
- Whether you’re an active member (paying contributions) or a deferred member (you’ve stopped paying contributions, but your pension savings are still in the Scheme).
- Whether we’ve applied the charges at the right time – for example, when you joined the Scheme.
- We’ve also made sure that you’ve only been charged once, even if you have more than one contract and more than one lot of pension savings in the Scheme (with the same or different employers).
If you’ve paid higher charges than you should have, the adjustment on your statement shows the refund we’ve added to your account. If you have several employment contracts, we added the refund to the account with the largest value.
If you’ve paid lower charges than you should have, the adjustment on your statement shows the debit we’ve taken from your account. If you have several employment contracts, we may have debited more than one account if there wasn’t enough in a single account.
I disagree with the amount being refunded or debited, what can I do?
If you think we’ve got something wrong, please let us know. We’ll do our best to put things right. You can contact us online through our member contact form or call us on 0330 100 3334 (Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm). To help us help you faster please tell us your full name, address and National Insurance number whenever you contact us.
If you’re not satisfied after doing this, you can use our formal complaints process. This is a step-by-step process involving our trustee and The Pensions Ombudsman.
We use a method called a Statutory Money Purchase Illustration (SMPI) to work out future pension estimates for you. All pension providers must use this method.
Your SMPI assumes you’ll use your pension savings in the Scheme to buy a pension – also known as an annuity – when you retire. It shows an estimate of the amount of pension you might get, in today’s money. (You don’t have to buy a pension – other options are available – but this keeps it simple and makes it possible to compare your estimates from year to year.)
How we work out the estimates on your benefit statement
We start with the estimated value of your pension savings on 31 March each year. But lots of things can affect the value of your pension between that time and when you decide to use your money – so we had to make some assumptions to work out your future pension estimate.
Assumptions about costs, contributions and inflation
Your SMPI assumes:
- the values and investment unit prices in your benefit statement for 31 March are correct
- any contributions we received after 31 March aren’t included
costs and charges are the same as they are at the date of your benefit statement - you and your employer continue to pay contributions to the Scheme at the same rates you were paying at the date of the benefit statement
- your pensionable earnings (the earnings that count towards your pension contributions) increase at 2.5% a year to the date you retire (we assume this is your State Pension age unless you’ve told us something different), and
- inflation will be 2.5% a year to the date you retire.
Assumptions about investment
Your SMPI assumes:
- we invest your pension savings in the Diversified Growth Fund until 10 years before you’re due to retire.
- from this date we gradually switch them to the Retirement Countdown Fund, and
- the investment funds will grow at the following rates:
- Diversified Growth Fund: 5% a year
- Retirement Countdown Fund (Series I and II): 2% a year.
Find out more about how your pension savings are invested.
Assumptions about how you use your pension savings
Your SMPI assumes:
- you will use your pension savings in the Scheme to buy a pension (annuity)
- your pension won’t increase, and
- your pension won’t include a spouse’s or civil partner’s pension.
The future pension figures on your benefit statement are estimates in today’s money. What actually happens will be different from what we’ve assumed, so these figures don’t come with a guarantee. For example, you may not use your pension savings to buy a pension. If you do buy a pension, its value depends on things like investment performance and the cost of turning your pension savings into an income, which may be different from the assumptions we’ve made here.
We can’t promise that your benefit statement shows the actual amount of money you, or anyone else who benefits from your pension, will get. You could get more or less than this amount. These figures are a guide to help you plan for the future. See more in our costs and charges explained booklet.
This is because you have more than one lot of pension savings with us. This could be because:
- you left your workplace pension in the Scheme, then rejoined at a later date
- how often you get paid has changed – for example, from weekly to monthly, or
- you’ve worked for more than one company who uses now:pensions as a pension provider.
If you’ve got several statements for the same Scheme year, it’s likely you have more than one contract with us. Each contract has a unique ID. You can see all your contracts by logging in to your member account at nowgateway.com/.
Each statement you receive will have your unique now:pensions contract ID for those pension savings. To work out the total value of your pension savings with us, add the savings values from each statement together.
You pay three different charges.
- Monthly administration charge. This is for running the Scheme. It costs £1.75 a month or £21 a year. But we won’t take the full administration charge if it would make the value of your pension savings lower than £100.
- Investment management charge. This is for investing the money in the Scheme. It costs 0.3% of the value of your pension savings every year.
- Transaction costs. These are for buying and selling investments. We don’t charge for them separately. We factor them into the returns on the Scheme’s investments.
You can see the combined effect of the monthly administration charge, investment management charge, and transaction costs over time in our costs and charges booklet.
Charging limit
We won’t take the full administration charge if it would make the value of your pension savings lower than £100. This helps prevent small amounts of pension savings being eaten away by administration fees.
The amount you pay for your pension matters a lot over a lifetime of saving. Download our costs and charges booklet for more examples of the effect of costs and charges on the value of your pension savings over time.
All members of the Scheme get a benefit statement. This includes you if:
- you paid contributions into your workplace pension during the Scheme year (up until 31 March)
- you no longer pay contributions, but still have pension savings in the Scheme.
We won’t give you a statement if you no longer have any pension savings in the Scheme. This is usually because you’ve transferred your pension savings out to another pension provider.
Your benefit statement is available to see online on our secure website, statements.nowpensions.com. You can download and print a copy.
If we have an email address for you, we’ll send you instructions telling you how to log in and see your benefit statement.
If we don’t have an email address for you, we’ll post your benefit statement notification to your home address, so please make sure we have an up-to-date address for you.
To ask to receive your benefit statement notification by email, please contact us online through our member contact form or email membersupport@nowpensions.com. To help us help you faster, please quote your full name and address, plus your now:pensions contract ID and National Insurance number in the email.
You can also call our member support team on 0330 100 3334 from 9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday. When you contact us, please quote your full name and address, plus your now:pensions contract ID and National Insurance number. We might record your call to help us improve our service to you.
The now:pensions Scheme year runs from 1 April to 31 March. We must give you your annual benefit statement within 12 months of the last Scheme year. For example, we’ll make your 2022-2023 Scheme year statement available after 31 March 2023, but before 31 March 2024.
If you join our Scheme after 31 March 2024 (the end of the Scheme year), you won’t receive a benefit statement for 2023-2024. You’ll get your first statement next year for the Scheme year ending 31 March 2025.
Your benefit statement is an annual summary of your pension savings. It tells you about the savings you have now and what they could be worth in the future. Keep your benefit statement safe – it may help you when you’re making decisions about your retirement.
Your benefit statement tells you
- how much money you already have in your workplace pension savings up to 31 March 2023
- the charges you pay us to look after your pension
- how much money you could have on the date you plan to retire, and
- what you could do to save more money for your retirement.
Remember, you can check your latest fund value in our member website at nowgateway.com.
Access your latest benefit statement
Setting up your statement for the first time?
- Go to statements.nowpensions.com
- Enter your user ID <xxxxxx> and your temporary password. This is your National Insurance number, which is in the following format: QQ123456C. You can find your National Insurance number on your payslip.
- You’ll be prompted to re-enter the user ID and your temporary password. You’ll then be asked to create a new password. This should be made up of at least eight characters, including a mix of upper- and lower-case letters, numbers and a special character such as !, ?, @, or $.
- When you’ve done this, the website will return to the login page. You’ll need to log in again with your new password. In future, you’ll only need your user ID and new password to log in.
Already set up your benefit statement account?
- Go to statements.nowpensions.com and enter your user ID <xxxxxx> and password. Remember, your password is case-sensitive. If you’ve forgotten your password, go to ‘Click reset forgotten password’ and set up a new one.
- To access your benefit statement: once you’re logged in, go to the ‘Menu’ button, then ‘New Document’. Select ‘View’ to open and read your benefit statement.