About AboutPensions.co.uk

AboutPensions.co.uk exists for one reason: pensions are confusing, and they shouldn't be. Every year, millions of people in the UK are asked to make decisions about state pensions, workplace schemes, personal pots and pension credit — often without ever being taught how any of it actually works. We built this site to close that gap, in plain English, with no strings attached.

How it started

The site was started in 2019 by two people who kept running into the same problem from opposite sides of the desk. Helen had spent close to fifteen years working in pension scheme administration, first for a large third-party administrator and later in-house for a mid-sized employer, processing everything from auto-enrolment paperwork to transfer requests and retirement quotes. Tom had spent a similar stretch of time as a financial journalist, writing consumer finance pages for a regional newspaper before going freelance, regularly fielding reader questions that started with some version of "I don't understand my pension statement, can you explain it?"

What struck them both, separately, was how often the questions were genuinely simple — what is a qualifying earnings threshold, when can I actually take my pension, will I get the full state pension, what happens to my pot if I change jobs — and how rarely the answers were. Official sources were accurate but written for professionals, dense with cross-references and caveats. Comparison sites and forums were friendlier to read, but usually existed to sell something, whether that was a product, a lead, or an advice consultation. Nobody seemed to be simply explaining how the system worked, without an angle.

Helen and Tom met at a personal finance event in Manchester, got talking about exactly this frustration, and within a few months had sketched out the first handful of articles on a laptop over a weekend: what auto-enrolment actually means for a payslip, how the state pension triple lock works, what pension credit is and who qualifies. The response from early readers — friends, family, a few colleagues who'd been asking them both pension questions for years anyway — was enough encouragement to keep going. What started as a handful of explainer pages has grown, gradually and mostly through word of mouth, into a fuller resource covering the whole span of UK pension topics, from the state pension and pension credit through to workplace schemes, personal pensions, tax relief, retirement income options and how to protect yourself from pension scams.

The team is still small. A handful of contributors with backgrounds in pension administration, financial journalism and consumer guidance research and write the articles between them, and everything is checked against primary sources before it's published. We're not a large financial institution, and we don't want to be mistaken for one — we're a small, independent publisher that happens to care a great deal about pensions being understandable.

What we do — and don't — do

We write plain-English explainers about how the UK pension system works. We do not sell pension products, we do not take commission for recommending providers, and we do not provide regulated financial advice. That separation matters to us. It means we have no reason to steer you toward one product, provider or decision over another — our only job is to help the rules make sense, so that whatever you decide to do next, you're doing it with a clearer picture of how things actually work.

Our editorial principles

• 1

  Plain English, always. If a term needs jargon to explain, we explain the jargon too — we never assume prior knowledge.

• 2

  No financial advice, no product sales. We explain how things work; we never tell you what to buy or where to put your money, and we don't earn commission from providers.

• 3

  Kept up to date. Pension rates, thresholds and rules change most tax years, and we review and update our articles as they do, rather than leaving old figures live.

• 4

  Sources checked. Every figure and rule is checked against official sources such as gov.uk, MoneyHelper and the Financial Conduct Authority before it's published.

If you've spotted something out of date, found an error, or just want to tell us a question we haven't covered yet, we'd genuinely like to hear from you — visit our contact page to get in touch.