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Personal pensions

Are you worried you've been given the wrong pensions advice? Or do you feel a pensions firm made mistakes running your scheme, or when you tried to access your money, transfer your pension or change the investments in your scheme?

On this page you'll find out whether you can bring a complaint about your personal pension to us and what will happen if you do.

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On this page

  1. What is a personal pension?
  2. Can you complain about your personal pension?
  3. How to complain about your personal pension
  4. How we resolve complaints about personal pensions
  5. Further information

Handling pensions complaints?

See our guidance for advisers and pension providers on personal pensions

What is a personal pension?

Pensions are a tax-efficient way to save for retirement. A personal pension is one that you arrange yourself. You choose the provider and decide how your contributions will be paid. You might do this through an independent financial adviser (IFA).

See more about personal pensions on the MoneyHelper website.

Can you complain about your personal pension?

You may have followed pensions advice that you now believe was unsuitable because the investment or type of pension was wrong for you.

Or you may feel you’ve lost out because your pension provider made mistakes with the administration of the pension, caused delays or gave you incomplete or the wrong information.

We can consider most complaints about personal pension arrangements. If we can’t investigate your pensions complaint, we’ll tell you about organisation that might be able to help you.

How to complain about your personal pension

Our service is free and easy to use. 

  1. Before bringing your complaint to us, you should make a formal complaint to the company involved.
  2. If they don't send you a final response letter within eight weeks – or you're unhappy with their response – you can complain to an ombudsman.
  3. Our complaint checker will tell you more about some of the things we need to know upfront and help you make sure you’re ready to send us your complaint.
  4. Fill in our online complaint form. Your case will be assigned to a case handler who will get in touch when they start to investigate.
  5. To help us consider a complaint fairly, we may ask you to provide more information to help us understand what happened.

Use our complaint checker

How we resolve complaints about personal pensions

We’ll make our decision about what happened using evidence from you, the financial business and any relevant third parties. To reach a decision, we'll also consider: 

  • the relevant law
  • any regulations that applied at the time
  • good industry practice and relevant regulatory guidance

We'll tell you whether we believe you've been treated unfairly or not. If we don't uphold your complaint, we'll tell you why and explain how we reached our decision.

  • If your complaint is about the pensions advice you received, including mis-selling, we'll look at whether:

    • the pension arrangement was suitable for your circumstances and financial goals
    • the investments in the pension were a good fit for your attitude to risk – and ability to afford risk

    If we decide the pensions advice you received wasn’t suitable, we’ll ask the IFA or pensions provider to put things right.

    So, if you suffered financial loss for example, we might tell them to make a payment into your pension plan. If that’s not possible, we might tell them to pay the money to you directly.

    Every case is unique and we assess each one according to its own merits. But, if it looks like the investments were unsuitable – and you’ve got less in your pensions pot because of that – we’ll usually tell the IFA, pensions adviser or provider, to make up the difference.

    Of course, it might not be possible to work out exactly how much money you might have lost or would otherwise have. If so, we’ll work out what would have been likely from what we know about your case.

  • In cases about the administration of a personal pension arrangement or delays, we’ll look at how the mistake affected you.

    For example, if you didn’t get your pension payments on time because of an administrative error, we’ll ask the IFA or pensions provider to put things right. We might tell them to pay you the missed payments, plus interest up to the date of payment.

    If documents have been sent to a wrong address, or original documents have gone missing, we might tell them to pay you for the distress or inconvenience this caused you. Or we’ll say they should cover the cost of replacing the originals.

If we think you've lost money – or may lose retirement income – because you received the wrong pensions advice, we'll tell the financial adviser or pensions provider to put things right.

We may also tell them to pay you compensation for any distress or inconvenience you have suffered.

What to expect

Further information

Find out more about the Pensions Ombudsman on their website

For details on where to complain about different types of pension problem, see the MoneyHelper website.

The Department of Work and Pensions offers more information about retirement planning.