To ask about your work place pension?

[Mmmmarmalade]

How much you contribute as a % of your salary and how much your employer does?

The minimum an employer has to is 3% which feels awfully low.

my old old employer had a very good scheme, performed v well to, they paid 10% and then a further match up to 6%.
current is ok competitively but not as good, 8+5%

what’s yours like? Wish I still had my old pension plan, can’t lie

I work for the NHS and employee contributions are based income. I pay 9.8% as a band 6 and employer contributions have just increased to 23% I think.

I work for a charity.

Employer pays 7.5%
I pay 15.5%

My employer matches up to 10%

I work for a tech company, I pay in 4% and they pay in 5%. I can up my contribution if I want but they only match up to that 5%

Employer pays 10% on top of salary but I can top that up as much as I want through salary sacrifice. I change it month to month but at the moment I'm paying 40% while I can

Well known High Street shoe chain, minimum wage job, they pay the minimum, as do I.

Private sector, global company. As standard I pay 2.5%, they pay 6.5%. If I pay anything additional, they will pay an additional 10% of what I’m paying (so if I pay an additional 10% they’ll pay an additional 1%). Nor particularly great but I know it could be a lot worse!

Employer pays 10% (no employee contribution required). They then match up to a further 7%...so a 7% contribution from me sees 24% going into my pension.

I think i pay 5.5% and employer contributes...around 21-23%. It's not quite that exactly as it's a defined benefit pension so it works out in an odd way.

So all in, that’s over 30% going into your pension a month?

im in the wrong line of work!

Do you work for a prominent high street bank?

Anyone with defined benefit (DB) can be ignored as the input isn't connected to the pension paid.

Mine is 10% as standard, a match up to 3%. I put in 15% so 25%. Still concerned it won't be enough to be honest but I do some other (small) DB pensions.

University (USS - the largest private pension scheme in the UK)
Employee 6.1%
Employer 14.5%

Do you work for a prominent high street bank?

Mmm, possibly 👀😂

Private sector, my employer standard is 5% they match to 8%. I pay 8% but have also paid in additional when it suited me as salary sacrifice.

Mine is tremendously crap. They pay the absolute minimum which is 3% but only on the minimum qualifying salary which is £6,240-£50,270. I make £110,000 so they actually only contribute what works out at about 1.3% of my total salary. As a result I pay 15% myself. That said, I'd always pay at least £10k in a year to keep myself under the £100k loss of personal allowance, but it's still a lot more than I'd like to have to contribute.

Snap

Law firm. Employer puts in 5%, I put in 15%.

@Mmmmarmalade plenty of vacancies... I only pay 6.5% as only band 2

Yes I didn't understand this for ages, got confused as to why my pension looked so small when apparently more than 32% of my salary was being put into it (civil service).

It's still a good scheme though, just a bit confusing.

tbh I'm usually good at "understanding" stuff - reading lots if completely info and summarising it simply is literally a key part of my job! But despite this and csp creating loads of guides pensions are the one thing I can never get my head around!

Also law firm. Also 5% from employer. I put in 5%, though hoping to up this when I don’t have two in nursery!

I pay 7.35% (if I was on a lower salary it would only be about 5%) and employer pays 28.97%

It’s a defined benefit scheme.

People need to be clear if their pensions are direct benefit or direct contribution. It's not comparing like with like.

The cost of public sector pensions is huge. It can't be underestimated when comparing salaries between sectors.

According to FT research: https://www.ft.com/content/9d9b03d0-55ff-4e2a-8ec7-2caab0a89381

The average cost of all UK public sector pensions for 2021 is 63 per cent of the salaries. Some of this is paid by employee contributions, averaging 8 per cent, leaving the balance — 55 per cent of salary — to be paid by taxpayers.

So on average, a public sector salary of £34k would need to be £50k in the private sector if the private sector job came with the average employer contribution (4.5% from my Googling) just to get to the same salary + pension contribution total.

*defined

Basically all your NHS and public sector will be DB, everyone else will be DC. Highly unlikely to see a private sector DB scheme these days.