Self-Employed Pensions

If you work for yourself, no one is going to enrol you into a pension automatically. Auto-enrolment — the system that has quietly built retirement savings for millions of UK employees since 2012 — only applies where there's an employer to do the enrolling. With around 4.4 million self-employed workers in the UK, a large slice of the workforce sits entirely outside that safety net, which is part of the reason self-employed pension saving lags so far behind employees': research consistently finds only a minority of self-employed workers are paying into a pension at any given time, even though nothing stops them from doing so. The good news is that every option available to employees — and a couple that are specific to the self-employed — is still open to you, along with exactly the same tax relief on contributions. What's missing isn't opportunity, it's the automatic nudge. These guides exist to replace that nudge: they explain the practical routes into saving, how much makes sense given profits that can swing from year to year, and how to actually get a pension open and running without wading through jargon.