Yes. NOW: Pensions operates a net pay scheme, so your contributions come out of your pay before income tax is taken off. So if you’re a taxpayer, you automatically get full tax relief – you don’t pay any income tax on the money you contribute to your pension. However, if you don’t pay any tax you don’t automatically get tax relief.
Although the government is taking steps to address this, NOW: Pensions wants to make sure non-taxpayers don’t miss out, so we have our own tax top-up scheme. If you haven’t paid tax on any of your UK earnings, we promise to top up your pension savings by the amount of tax relief you’ve missed out each tax year.
You can do this at the end of each year. Just fill in our tax top-up scheme form.
You can contribute up to 100% of your salary towards your pension savings and still get tax relief, as long as the combined contributions from you and your employer are below the annual allowance. This applies to all the pensions you’re actively saving into, including NOW: Pensions and any personal pensions you have. It doesn’t apply to your State Pension.
For most people, the current annual allowance is £60,000 for the tax year 2024-2025. If you go over this you’ll have to pay tax on the amount over the allowance.
If you start taking money out of your pension savings while you’re still paying in to them, the money purchase annual allowance – currently £10,000 a year – could affect you. This means the total amount you and your workplace can pay into your pension savings and still get tax relief goes down to £10,000 a year.