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We are an independent education site. We build calculators and plain-English guides so that you can understand roughly what your Armed Forces pension is worth and how the schemes differ, before you ask Veterans UK for the official numbers. That is the limit of what we do, and it is deliberate: we are not allowed to, and would not want to, sit between you and your own record.

Write to us when you have spotted something on the website itself. Good reasons to email include a figure that looks wrong on a calculator or a guide, a typo or a broken link, a page that is hard to read on your phone or with a screen reader, a question about how one of our calculators arrives at its number, or a suggestion for a guide we have not written yet. We also take press and partnership enquiries on the same address. If you are reporting a possible error, the more specific you are, the faster we can act: tell us the exact page, the scheme, the inputs you used and the result you saw, and ideally why you think it is off (for example, an official forecast that says something different).

What we cannot do is just as important. We cannot see your JPA record, your years of reckonable service, your pensionable pay or your McCloud position. We cannot change your bank details, chase a missing payment, correct your service history, or issue anything official. We do not give regulated financial advice, so we will not tell you whether to commute, whether to transfer a pension in, or what to do with your lump sum. If your question is really about your own money or your own record, the right answer is one of the three organisations below, and we will say so and point you there rather than guess.

Veterans UK, part of the Ministry of Defence, administers the Armed Forces Pension Schemes. They are the only people who can give you an official pension forecast or pay a preserved pension when it falls due. If you want real numbers rather than our estimate, this is where they come from.

Forecasts are requested on a form. If you are still serving and want a projection of what you are on course to receive, you use form 12. If you have already left with a preserved pension and want to know what has been preserved for you, you use form 14. These forms go to Veterans UK, not to us, and the figure they return is the one that counts. Our calculators are designed to get you into the right ballpark and to help you read that official forecast with confidence, not to replace it.

Veterans UK also handles claiming your pension and lump sum, Early Departure Payments where you qualify, ill-health and injury awards, and changes to your personal details once you are a pensioner or deferred member. When you contact them, have your service number to hand, along with your National Insurance number, your dates of service, and which scheme or schemes you were in (many people moved into AFPS 15 during the McCloud remedy period from 1 April 2015 to 31 March 2022, and may have benefits in more than one scheme). Quoting the right form number and your service number in your first message usually saves a round of back-and-forth. You can find their current contact routes and the forms on gov.uk, and we summarise what they do on our Veterans UK page.

While you are still in service, a lot of what feeds your pension is really pay and personnel administration, and that runs through the Joint Personnel Administration Centre, JPAC, together with your unit's HR or admin staff. Your pension in AFPS 15 is built each year from your pensionable pay, so if your pay record is wrong, your eventual pension can be wrong too, which is why this matters even though it feels a long way from retirement.

Contact JPAC and your unit admin for things that live on JPA: a pay query, an allowance that has not been applied, a correction to your recorded service or rank, access to your own JPA account, and your in-service pension paperwork. They are the people who can actually change the underlying record. We cannot, and Veterans UK generally deals with the pension once your service feeds through rather than with day-to-day pay. If you think your pensionable pay has been recorded incorrectly, raise it through JPAC and your chain of command while you are still serving, because it is far easier to fix at the time than years later when you are trying to reconcile a forecast. Have your service number and the relevant dates ready, and keep a copy of anything you submit.

Once a pension is actually in payment, the month-to-month money is handled by the scheme's paying agent on behalf of Veterans UK. This is the body that pays the money into your account, applies tax codes from HMRC, sends your payslips and your P60, and applies the annual increase. Pensions in payment rise each April in line with the relevant CPI figure: they went up by 6.7% in 2024, 1.7% in 2025, and 3.8% in April 2026.

Contact the paying agent for things that concern a pension already being paid: a change of bank account or address, a question about the amount you have received or the tax taken off, a missing or late payment, a replacement payslip or P60, or letting them know about a bereavement so that any survivor benefits can be arranged. Your payslip and award letter will tell you who your paying agent is and how to reach them; if you cannot find it, Veterans UK can point you to the right place. Note the split: Veterans UK decides what you are entitled to and Early Departure Payments and the like, while the paying agent handles the mechanics of getting the right amount to you each month. Tax codes themselves come from HMRC, so a query that is purely about your tax code may need to go to HMRC rather than the paying agent.