What happens when you change jobs?

Changing jobs is one of the most ordinary events in working life, yet it's also one of the moments that triggers the most pension questions. If you've handed in your notice, been offered a new role, or you're simply thinking ahead, it's completely natural to wonder what happens to the pension you've built up so far. The good news, and it's worth saying plainly at the outset, is that any pension you've built up with a previous employer is legally yours. It doesn't matter whether you've had one job or fifteen, whether you left after six months or twenty-six years, or whether the company you worked for has since been renamed, sold, merged, or gone out of business entirely. Contributions that have already been paid into a workplace pension on your behalf, whether by you or your employer, belong to you. Nobody can claim them back, and there is no requirement to "earn" them by staying employed for a minimum period, at least under modern rules. This article walks through exactly what happens to both defined contribution (DC) pots and defined benefit (DB) entitlements when you leave a job, the choices you have, and the practical admin steps worth taking so nothing gets lost along the way.

The one thing to remember: it's still your money

Before getting into the mechanics, it helps to understand why this reassurance is so solid in law. Under UK auto-enrolment rules, every contribution paid into a defined contribution workplace pension, whether from you, your employer, or in the form of tax relief added by the government, vests immediately. There is no waiting period and no clawback. This is quite different from things like unvested share options or bonus schemes, where leaving early can mean forfeiting value. Pension contributions simply don't work that way. The moment the money lands in your pension pot, it's recorded against your name and it stays there, growing or shrinking with investment performance, until you decide what to do with it.

Defined benefit schemes work slightly differently because you're not building up a "pot" of money in the same sense, you're building up an entitlement to a future income. But the same underlying principle applies: once you've completed a period of "qualifying service" (usually as little as thirty days under current rules, though it was historically two years in older schemes), the benefit you've accrued is preserved for you. Some very old scheme rules allowed a refund of contributions if you left within two years of joining a DB scheme, and you may occasionally come across this if you're dealing with a very old employment, but for the vast majority of people leaving jobs today, what you've built up is preserved and protected by law, ready to be drawn later in whatever form the scheme allows.

What happens to a DC pension pot when you leave

A defined contribution pension, sometimes called a "money purchase" pension, is essentially an investment account with your name on it. Contributions from you and your employer (plus tax relief) have been paid in over time and invested in funds you've usually chosen, or which have been chosen for you by default if you didn't actively pick anything. When you leave your job, several things happen, and equally importantly, several things don't happen:

• The pot stays invested. Your existing balance doesn't get cashed out, frozen, or transferred anywhere automatically. It remains invested exactly as it was, tracking the ups and downs of the stock market and other assets in the funds you're holding.
• You keep your online access. You'll usually still be able to log into the pension provider's portal, check your balance, see fund performance, and update your details, even though you're no longer contributing through payroll.
• New employer contributions stop. This is the big change. Once you leave, your former employer will no longer be paying into that specific pension arrangement, for the very sensible reason that they're no longer paying you a salary. Your own payroll contributions stop too, since they were taken directly from your pay.
• Personal contributions may or may not still be possible. Some workplace pension providers and master trusts will let you continue paying into the same pot personally, without an employer, especially if it's a well-known provider like a large insurer or master trust. Others are set up in a way that effectively closes the door to further contributions once your employment ends, and you'd need to open a new personal pension for ongoing saving instead. It's always worth checking directly with the provider.
• Charges keep applying. Your pot will continue to have an annual management charge deducted, exactly as it did while you were employed there. This is worth bearing in mind if you end up with several small pots scattered across old employers, since each one is quietly still charging you, even if you've forgotten about it.
• It remains accessible from the normal minimum pension age. Just like any other DC pension, you'll be able to start drawing from it once you reach the normal minimum pension age, currently 55, rising to 57 from 2028, subject to the scheme's own rules and any protections that might apply.

What happens to a DB pension entitlement when you leave

Defined benefit pensions, sometimes called "final salary" or "career average" schemes, work on a completely different model. Instead of a pot of money that goes up and down with markets, you build up an entitlement to a guaranteed income in retirement, calculated using a formula based on your salary and years of service. When you leave a job with a DB pension before you're due to start drawing it, you become what's known as a "deferred member."

Being a deferred member means the scheme has effectively put your pension "on ice" until you're ready to claim it, but it doesn't sit still doing nothing. Between the date you leave and the date you eventually draw your pension, your deferred entitlement is revalued, broadly in line with inflation, so that its buying power isn't eroded by the passage of time. Private sector schemes typically use a statutory revaluation order, which for many schemes caps increases at 5% a year for pre-2009 accrual and 2.5% a year for benefits built up after 2009, applied to whichever measure of inflation (CPI, historically RPI) the scheme rules specify. Public sector schemes often use different, sometimes more generous, revaluation methods written into their own scheme rules.

You should receive a deferred benefits statement from the scheme, typically both shortly after you leave and then periodically (often every year, sometimes only when requested) confirming what your preserved pension is worth in today's terms and what it's projected to be worth at your scheme's normal retirement age. Keep these safe. If you move house or change your email address, make sure you tell the scheme administrator, because it's remarkably easy to lose contact with a DB scheme you left decades before you're due to draw it, and reconnecting later can take time.

Your choices when you leave a job

Once you've left, you generally have a small number of options for what to do with a DC pot (DB entitlements are usually simpler, since transferring them is a bigger decision covered in detail elsewhere). Here's how the main choices stack up:

• 1. Leave it where it is. The simplest option by far. Your pot stays with the existing provider, keeps investing, and you do nothing further for now. This is often perfectly sensible, especially if the scheme has competitive charges and decent fund choices, or if you're not sure yet what you want to do. The main downside is that if you do this every time you change jobs, you can end up with a scattering of small pots across several providers, which can become harder to track and manage over the years.
• 2. Transfer it into your new employer's pension scheme. Many new employers' schemes will accept a transfer in from a previous DC pot. This can simplify things by consolidating your savings in one place, under one login, with one set of charges. It's worth checking the new scheme's charges and fund range compare favourably before doing this, and confirming there's nothing valuable you'd lose by moving (some older pensions carry valuable guarantees, which is covered in more depth in our guide on consolidating old pensions).
• 3. Transfer it into a personal pension. Rather than moving it into a new employer's scheme, you could transfer an old DC pot into a personal pension or SIPP (self-invested personal pension) that you control independently of any employer. This gives you a consistent home for pension savings across multiple jobs over your career, and can make it easier to see your total retirement savings in one place.

Practical admin steps worth taking when you leave a job

Regardless of which option appeals to you, a little bit of admin when you leave a job can save a lot of hassle years or decades later. Consider working through this short checklist:

• Update your contact details with the pension scheme directly, not just with your (former) employer's HR team. Pension providers and scheme administrators need your current address, email, and phone number to reach you, and HR departments don't always pass on personal contact changes after you've left.
• Note down your policy number, scheme reference, or member number. This single piece of information makes any future contact with the scheme dramatically faster and easier. Keep it somewhere safe alongside other important paperwork.
• Request a leaving statement or benefit statement confirming the value of your DC pot or the details of your preserved DB pension at the point you left. This gives you a clear reference point to check against in future.
• Decide, even if only provisionally, what you want to do with the pot. You don't need to decide immediately, but having a rough plan (leave it, transfer it, keep an eye on it) reduces the chance of simply forgetting about it.
• Keep a simple personal record of every pension you've ever had, including employer name, dates of employment, and provider name if known. This single document becomes hugely valuable if you ever need to track down a pension you've lost touch with in later life.

Auto-enrolment and starting again with a new employer

Just as leaving a job sets certain wheels in motion for the pension you're leaving behind, starting a new one triggers a fresh set of pension arrangements too, and it's worth understanding how the two fit together. Under UK auto-enrolment law, most employers must automatically enrol eligible staff into a workplace pension, typically anyone aged between 22 and State Pension age who earns above the earnings threshold (around £10,000 a year in 2026/27, though this is reviewed periodically). This happens within the first few weeks of a new job, and it usually means a brand new pension arrangement is opened with your new employer's chosen provider, separate entirely from any pot you built up previously. Combined minimum contributions under auto-enrolment currently sit at 8% of qualifying earnings, made up of at least 3% from your employer and the rest from you (including tax relief), though many employers contribute more generously than the legal minimum.

It's worth stressing that this new pension is not automatically linked to your old one in any way; the two exist entirely independently unless you actively choose to transfer one into the other. You can, in principle, opt out of your new employer's pension scheme, but doing so means giving up the employer's contribution entirely, which is effectively free money on top of your own salary, so it's rarely a decision to take lightly. If you do stay enrolled, which the vast majority of people sensibly do, you'll simply be building up a second (or third, or fourth) pension pot to sit alongside whatever you already have from previous employers, at least until you decide whether to consolidate.

Multiple small pots: a quick reality check

Because most people change jobs several times across a working life, and because auto-enrolment now applies to the vast majority of workplaces, it's become extremely common to end up with a handful of separate pension pots by the time retirement approaches, rather than one single pension built up over decades with a single employer, which was far more typical a generation or two ago. Industry research consistently shows that the average worker now accumulates multiple pension pots over their career, and it's not unusual to lose track of one or more of them entirely somewhere along the way, particularly ones from short stints in a job many years back.

None of this is a problem in itself; each pot is still legally yours, still invested, and still working towards your retirement regardless of how many there are. But it does mean that, at some point, it's worth taking stock of everything you've built up, checking each pot's charges and any guarantees it might carry, and deciding whether to leave things as they are or bring some or all of them together. Our companion guide on whether to combine your old pensions walks through exactly how to weigh up that decision, and our guide on finding a lost pension covers what to do if you suspect you've genuinely lost touch with one along the way.