Pension Annual Allowance Calculator — Your Real 2026/27 Limit

The pension annual allowance for 2026/27 is £60,000 — the total pension input you can make across all your registered pension schemes in a single tax year while still receiving tax relief. This covers everything: your own contributions, employer contributions (including salary sacrifice), any third-party contributions, and for defined benefit schemes, an imputed value of the year's accrual.

For most people, £60,000 is a genuinely academic ceiling — typical UK pension savers contribute far less in a single year. It matters most for higher earners, those with large employer contributions, and anyone making a significant one-off contribution.

The taper applies only when both of these are true in the same tax year: your threshold income exceeds £200,000 (broadly your income excluding employer pension contributions), and your adjusted income exceeds £260,000 (threshold income plus employer pension contributions).

The minimum of £10,000 is reached once adjusted income hits £360,000. This is genuinely a trap that catches people out unexpectedly — defined benefit scheme accrual counts toward adjusted income, meaning someone can be pushed into the taper zone without ever making an explicit decision to contribute more, purely from how their DB pension's value increased that year. Professional advice is strongly recommended for anyone near this zone.

Once you've flexibly accessed a defined contribution pension — taking income drawdown, or cashing in a flexi-access drawdown fund — your future annual allowance for money purchase contributions drops permanently to £10,000. This exists specifically to stop people withdrawing pension money and immediately re-contributing it to claim a second round of tax relief.

Once triggered, the MPAA cannot be reversed, and carry forward cannot be used to increase it back above £10,000 — it's a permanent change to your future DC contribution limit.

Carry forward lets you use unused annual allowance from the previous three tax years — for 2026/27, that's 2023/24, 2024/25 and 2025/26, each with their own £60,000 allowance. You must have been a member of a registered pension scheme in the years you're carrying forward from, and you use the current year's allowance first before dipping into carried-forward amounts.

In theory, this allows contributions up to £240,000 in a single tax year (£60,000 current plus up to £180,000 carried forward). In practice, personal contributions remain capped at 100% of your UK earnings for the year — earn £35,000, and you can only personally contribute £35,000 with tax relief, regardless of how much allowance is technically available. Employer contributions, notably, aren't restricted by this earnings cap, and can fill the remaining gap.

Contributions above your available allowance trigger an annual allowance charge — the tax relief is effectively clawed back, with the excess taxed at your marginal income tax rate, added to your Self Assessment bill. Your pension scheme administrator is required to send you a pension savings statement if your input in that scheme exceeds the standard allowance, giving you the figures needed to check your position.

You have £150,000 adjusted income and £90,000 UK earnings, with no MPAA trigger. Since £150,000 is below the £260,000 taper threshold, your full £60,000 standard allowance applies. With £90,000 of earnings, your personal contribution isn't earnings-capped below the allowance either — you have the full £60,000 available.

Now picture £300,000 adjusted income instead. That's £40,000 above the £260,000 threshold, so your allowance tapers down by £20,000 (half of £40,000), leaving a reduced allowance of £40,000 for the year — a full £20,000 less than the headline figure, purely from crossing into the taper zone.

Official sources & further reading: check current pension rules at GOV.UK, read general pension guidance at MoneyHelper, and confirm your position with a qualified financial adviser. See how this interacts with your lump sum decision using our 25% tax-free lump sum guide, or browse every tool on the mortgage calculators homepage.