Members Your retirement

Planning your retirement now means you’re more likely to get the kind of life you want in the future.

Read about taking money for your retirement Frequently asked questions

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Planning your retirement step by step

Use our step by step retirement planner to help you understand what you want from your retirement and how you can take the right steps to get there.

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Your retirement options

What you can do in now:pensions, what’s available outside now:pensions.

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Pensions and tax

What’s taxed, what isn’t, what you need to think about.

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Life events

Over time things happen that change our lives and our financial plans. Here you can look at how different life events could change your plans for pension saving.

More on life events

Find and combine your other pensions

Transferring pensions can make sense if you have several pensions you want to put together. It could save you money, depending on the charges you pay to different pension providers.

We've partnered with The Pension Lab, an external provider, to make it easy for you to find other pensions and bring them in to your now:pensions savings.

Find and combine now
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Frequently asked questions

See all support for members

With now:u, you can plan your retirement whenever you want. now:u always shows the projected value of your pension savings at your planned retirement age.  

Log in to now:u and go to Plan your retirement. You can play around with our retirement planner to see how paying more in to your pension savings or changing your planned retirement age changes the projected value of your pension savings.  

You can also use the planner to see how long your money is likely to last after you retire.  

The earlier, the better. It’s never too early.  

  • The more you plan, the more likely you are to get the kind of retirement you want.  
  • And the longer your pension savings have to build up, the more money you’re likely to have when you retire.  

Read more about planning your retirement here.

MoneyHelper and Pension Wise 

The government-backed MoneyHelper service offers free, impartial guidance about a whole range of money matters including budgeting, money troubles, savings and pensions. Trained experts are available to help by phone and webchat. 

MoneyHelper includes Pension Wise, a service for people over 50 that explains your options for taking money out of your pension savings.  You can chat to pension experts on the website.

If you’re over 50 you can make an appointment for a guidance call. This can either be a call with a pensions expert, or a self-guided appointment online.

Calls last about an hour.

The self-guided appointment is expected to last about 30 minutes, but you can save it at any time and come back to it later.

Citizens Advice 

Citizens Advice is a charity offering confidential help and advice to help people sort out their problems, including money and debt. 

Regulated financial advice  

The organisations we’ve listed so far offer guidance. They don’t give specific advice, tailored to you, recommending what you should do. You can only get this kind of advice from an adviser who’s regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). You usually have to pay for regulated financial advice and it can seem expensive, but it could be money well spent if it gives you a better retirement.

The MoneyHelper website has a guide to choosing a financial adviser and a directory of advisers who can give regulated financial advice about pensions.

The Personal Finance Society (PFS) has a What we do for the public section, including a directory you can filter to find advisers that specialise in giving regulated financial advice about retirement planning.

The FCA has a register of financial services firms regulated in the UK. You should check any adviser you’re thinking of using appears on this register as authorised to give advice on pensions.

Not while they’re building up. When you start to take your money out of now:pensions, you can usually have up to a quarter (25%) of it as tax-free cash, up to a maximum of £268,275. The rest is taxed like any other income. But you don’t pay National Insurance contributions on it.  

You can take some or all your pension savings as cash. A quarter will be tax free and the rest will be taxable. You can take all your pension savings as cash at once, or take cash in chunks.  

If you’re thinking of taking cash in chunks, you can use the retirement planner to see how long your money could last. Log in to now:u and go to Plan my retirement.  

Or, you can transfer your pension savings out of now:pensions. This could give you more options for retirement income.  

Check out more information on your retirement options here.