Here’s a question worth sitting with for a moment: when do you actually want to stop working?

Not when you think you’ll be able to. When you’d like to. For most people, the honest answer involves a number, a picture of what life looks like afterwards, and a vague hope that the pension will somehow make it happen.

The good news is that turning that hope into a plan doesn’t take long. A pension check is one of the most valuable things you can do with your finances, and most of it can be done in the time it takes to drink a cup of tea. Five minutes now could be the difference between retiring when you want to and working years longer than you’d planned.

Why now?

Late summer is when a lot of people quietly make a costly mistake. After the holidays, with the credit card bill arriving and autumn costs mounting, reducing pension contributions can feel like an easy way to free up some cash. It rarely is. If you’re in a workplace scheme, cutting or pausing contributions usually means giving up your employer’s contribution too, which is effectively turning down part of your pay.

It’s also a year of real change for pensions, which makes this the right moment to check your plan still holds up.

Step one: check what’s going in

If you’re employed, you’ve almost certainly been auto-enrolled into a workplace pension. For 2026/27, the minimum total contribution is 8% of your qualifying earnings, of which your employer must pay at least 3%.

The important detail is the phrase “qualifying earnings”. The minimum usually applies only to what you earn between £6,240 and £50,270 a year, not your whole salary. That means the headline 8% is often less than it sounds. On a £30,000 salary, the actual minimum contribution works out at 6.3% of full salary.

The minimum was designed as a floor, not a target. Many people will need more to retire comfortably, particularly if they started saving later or had career breaks. It’s worth checking whether your employer will match higher contributions, as some will, which is one of the best-value boosts available.

A five-minute illustration: increasing your contribution by 1% on a £40,000 salary means £400 a year going into your pension, but thanks to tax relief it costs a basic-rate taxpayer around £320 in take-home pay. Assuming 5% annual growth, that small change could add roughly £19,000 to your pot over 25 years. Not life-changing on its own, perhaps, but the kind of difference that can bring a retirement date forward.

Step two: check how it’s invested

Most people have never looked at which fund their pension is invested in. If you’ve never made a choice, you’re probably in your scheme’s default fund, which may or may not suit your goals, timescale and attitude to risk.

This year has been a reminder of how much that matters. According to Hargreaves Lansdown, the beginning of 2026 was very volatile because of higher oil prices linked to the war between the US and Iran, and performance varied widely across the market. Over the past 12 months, the FTSE 100 rose 23.6%, while mid-sized and smaller UK company indices returned 6.6% and 7.6% respectively.

Two people with similar pensions could therefore have had very different years depending purely on where their money was invested. When you check your fund, look at how it has performed over five years or more (a single year tells you very little), what it’s invested in, and what it costs. Charges that look small can make a big difference over decades.

Step three: check your retirement age assumptions

This is the step most people skip, and it’s arguably the most important.

Many pension funds automatically move your money into lower-risk investments as you approach your “selected retirement age”. If that age was set years ago and no longer matches your plans, your pension could be de-risking at the wrong time, either too early (missing out on growth) or too late (leaving you exposed to a market fall just before you retire). Check what age your provider has on record.

It’s also worth checking your State Pension age, because it’s changing now. The State Pension age is gradually increasing from 66 to 67 between 2026 and 2028. If you were born on or after 6 March 1961, your current State Pension age is 67, and a further rise to 68 is currently planned for 2044 to 2046.

That later rise could come sooner. A third statutory review of the State Pension Age has been running since July 2025 and has not yet reported. If you’re in your 40s or early 50s, it would be sensible not to assume your State Pension age is fixed.

You can check your State Pension age and get a forecast of what you’re on track to receive on GOV.UK in a few minutes. For reference, the full new State Pension is currently £241.30 a week.

Step four: understand the salary sacrifice change

If you pay into your pension through salary sacrifice, there’s a change on the horizon that’s worth understanding now, even though it doesn’t take effect until 2029.

Salary sacrifice is when you agree to reduce your gross salary or sacrifice a bonus and, in return, your employer pays the same amount into your pension. Because your salary is lower, you and your employer both pay less National Insurance. It’s one of the most efficient ways to save.

Announced in the November 2025 Budget, from April 2029 only the first £2,000 of employee pension contributions through salary sacrifice each year will be exempt from National Insurance. Anything above that will attract both employee and employer National Insurance, although the contributions will still be free of income tax.

In practical terms, if you sacrifice more than £2,000 a year, your take-home pay will be a little lower from 2029 for the same pension contribution. The exact effect depends on your salary. There may also be a knock-on effect if your employer currently shares its own National Insurance saving with you as an extra pension contribution, as some do. It’s worth asking your employer or HR team whether they plan to change anything.

The key thing is not to panic or stop contributing. Salary sacrifice will remain a tax-efficient way to save, and there’s time to plan.

Step five: check who inherits it

Finally, check your nominated beneficiaries (sometimes called an “expression of wish”). Marriages, divorces, children and grandchildren all change who you’d want to benefit, and many forms haven’t been updated in years. With pensions due to be brought into inheritance tax from April 2027, this matters more than ever.

Time and money

At its heart, a pension is about buying back time: the years you get to spend doing what matters to you, rather than working. Every decision you make about it now, however small, affects how much of that time you’ll have.

Most people know they should look at their pension. Fewer actually do, usually because it feels complicated or it’s easy to put off until “next month”. If that sounds familiar, you don’t have to work through it alone.

Book a pension review with Questa and our chartered financial planners will look at your contributions, investments and retirement plans with you, in plain English. As a chartered firm, we’re held to the highest professional standards in financial planning, so you can be confident you’re getting sound, impartial guidance on one of the most important decisions you’ll make.

This article is for general information only and does not constitute financial advice. The value of investments can fall as well as rise and you may get back less than you invest. Past performance is not a guide to future returns. Figures correct as of September 2026.