AFPS 15 Added Pension explained

What Added Pension actually is

Added Pension is an amount of extra annual pension you can buy, to increase your retirement benefits, your dependants' benefits, or both. It sits in Part 7 of the Armed Forces Pension Regulations 2014, and what you buy is credited to your pension account as either added pension (member) or added pension (member and dependants).

Any active AFPS 15 member who has begun qualifying service can buy it, Reservists included, from your first day of paid service until you leave.

It is extra pension, not a pot of cash. You cannot take the money out of the scheme, and the only route to cash is the ordinary AFPS 15 commutation option, where whatever percentage you commute from your main pension applies to the Added Pension too.

It is paid alongside your AFPS 15 pension: at Normal Pension Age 60 if you serve to 60, otherwise at Deferred Pension Age, which is your State Pension age. It is paid immediately and unreduced on a Tier 2, Tier 3 or serious ill-health award, and it counts towards Early Departure Payments.

The cap on how much you can buy

There is a ceiling, and it is easy to misread. The cap is on the amount of Added Pension you can receive each year in retirement, not on the contributions you can pay. It is set by HM Treasury and is career-wide across public service, not per scheme year and not per scheme.

It was £6,500 from 1 April 2015 and rises in line with the rate at which Added Pension itself is uprated, currently CPI, so the proportion of the cap you have used does not drift unless you buy more. The published figure for the 2025/26 scheme year is £8,716.92, and changes are advertised each scheme year through a JPA Operational Bulletin.

Two details catch people out. Added Pension bought in another public service scheme counts towards the same career cap, which is why Forms 6 and 6A ask you to declare it. And your contribution towards the cap is fixed when the contract is taken out, not revisited as your career changes. If continuing contributions would breach the cap, the administrator may cancel the contract by written notice.

The two ways to buy, and the timing rules

There are two purchase routes and you may use only one in a given scheme year, which runs 1 April to 31 March. You can take out one contract per scheme year, and you may pick a different route in a different year.

The minimum either way is £300 across the year, so twelve monthly payments of at least £25, or a single payment of at least £300. If a monthly contract starts part way through the year the minimum is scaled up by GAD's formula, £25 multiplied by 12 and divided by the payments remaining. A contract starting on 1 September, with seven left, has a minimum of £42.86 a month.

A contract must start on the 1st of a chosen future month and end no later than the following 31 March, and the start date cannot be in the past. A mid-year contract is genuinely shorter than twelve months, and deductions begin from the next available pay run. Monthly contributions stop automatically at 31 March, so a fresh contract is needed each year you want to keep buying.

The process is a quote then a contract. AFPS Form 6 requests the quote, and you get only one free quote per financial year, so decide beforehand which cover you want. DBS returns it expressed both as a lump sum and as a monthly figure, and AFPS Form 6A then enters the contract or later stops the payments. Our added pension calculator gives an indication first, but only a Form 6 quote is binding.

What it costs, and why age matters so much

The price comes from factor tables produced by the Government Actuary's Department. Every factor is the premium for £100 a year of Added Pension, and the arithmetic scales linearly: MOD's illustration is that if £100 costs £136 a month, £250 costs two and a half times that, £340.

Three things about you set the factor. Your Deferred Pension Age, which is your State Pension age, picks the table set. Your age when you joined the Regulars is the column. Your age when you give notice of election is the row. The factors are unisex and are set so the premium is actuarially equivalent to the benefits paid on retirement at age 60.

That equivalence is why cost rises with the age you buy at, throughout the table. A premium paid at 30 has three decades to work before the pension starts; the same £100 a year bought at 55 has to be funded over a much shorter run, so it costs more. The rise is steepest before 40 and flatter after it, and it keeps rising past 60.

Age of joining is in the calculation because it decides whether the factors allow for the possibility of an EDP, which is why reserve service and breaks in service are excluded from it, and why Reservists and re-joiners follow their own rules.

MOD's booklet publishes four indicative examples, each the premium for £100 a year:

Read those as four separate illustrations, not comparisons. Each uses a different combination of joining age and purchase age, so the gap between £136 and £156 is not the cost of adding dependants' cover, and nor is the gap between £1,885 and £2,139.

One phrasing point is widely misunderstood. MOD says the cost of a contract changes each year, and that is true for you personally, because each year your age at purchase moves you one row down the same column. It does not mean the tables are repriced annually. The Added Pension tables in GAD's current workbook, issued in June 2026, still carry factors implemented on 1 April 2024, and the June 2026 review updated only the transfer and divorce tables.

Member only, or member and dependants

The difference between the two contract types is absolute, not a matter of degree. Added Pension (member) increases your own retirement benefits and buys nothing at all for a survivor. Added Pension (member and dependants) increases yours and the pensions and lump sums payable to a spouse, civil partner, eligible partner or eligible children.

The regulations are strict: a dependant's or child's added pension is payable only where the member held, or would have held, the member and dependants form. If you bought member-only there is no survivor element to find later, and the survivor pension guide sets out what your dependants get from the rest of your pension.

Where the cover is bought, an adult dependant's pension is 62.5% of your total AFPS 15 pension including the Added Pension. For children, where an adult dependant's added pension is payable one eligible child receives 25% of your added pension and two or more share 37.5%; where none is payable one child receives a third and two or more share the whole, capped at a third each.

On the current factors, dependants' cover adds roughly 12% to the premium at younger purchase ages, rising to about 16% by age 59. Those percentages are our own calculation from the published factors rather than a figure MOD publishes, so treat them as the shape of the difference and not a quote.

One further difference. Added Pension (member) cannot be used in the Allocation option, where you give up part of your pension to increase a dependant's. The member and dependants form can be allocated, on the same limits as regular pension.

How it grows: prices, not earnings

Here is a detail almost nobody explains. While you are still serving, your earned AFPS 15 pension and your Added Pension are revalued each year by two different measures. The earned career average pension uses the change in earnings. Added Pension uses the change in prices.

That is not a rounding difference. The Public Service Pensions Revaluation Order 2026, in force from 1 April 2026, sets the change in prices at 3.8% and the change in earnings at 4.8% for the year to 31 March 2026. So this year your earned pension grew a full percentage point faster than the Added Pension beside it. In a year when prices outrun earnings it goes the other way.

After you leave, the Added Pension carries on being uprated by prices until Deferred Pension Age, and pensions in payment rose by 3.8% from 6 April 2026. Amounts bought in different scheme years can be combined into one pot once past increases have been applied.

The pension increase calculator models what indexation does over time, and the final salary and CARE comparison explains why the earned part is revalued at all.

The Annual Allowance trap

This is the part to read twice, because it is where a sensible purchase can produce a tax bill. The Annual Allowance caps tax-advantaged pension growth in a tax year, and the standard allowance is £60,000, tapered if your threshold income exceeds £200,000 and your adjusted income exceeds £260,000.

The trap is what goes into the calculation, and it is not the premium you paid. MOD's own pension savings tax booklet says it twice: for AFPS 15, the actual amount of extra pension you bought, not your contribution amount, is what is included.

That matters because serving members are closer to the allowance than they think. MOD's own worked example for an OF4 holding both AFPS 15 and AFPS 75 benefits reaches a combined pension input amount of £60,587.71 for 2024/25, already over the £60,000 allowance, before buying any Added Pension at all. A member near the line can be tipped into a charge by a fairly modest contract.

If a charge does arise there are two mitigations. Carry forward brings in unused allowance from the previous three tax years, which often absorbs a one-off spike. Scheme Pays lets the scheme settle the charge in return for a permanent actuarial reduction, elected on AFPS Form 17. Any pension enhancement from AVCs repurchased under the 2015 Pension Remedy counts towards the same allowance.

Relief on the way in depends on your route. Monthly contributions from salary are deducted before income tax is calculated, so relief is automatic at your marginal rate. A lump sum purchase means reclaiming the relief from HMRC yourself, through Self Assessment or by contacting HMRC. Benefits in payment are then taxed like the rest of your pension, which the tax on armed forces pensions guide covers.

MOD's own position is worth repeating: it is an individual's responsibility to manage their own tax dealings, and personnel are advised to seek their own financial advice before entering an Added Pension contract. This site is independent, not affiliated with the MOD or Veterans UK, and gives general information rather than regulated advice.

Leaving, ill health and death

What your Added Pension becomes depends on how you leave. If you leave with an EDP it increases the EDP lump sum and income as well as the deferred pension, with no early or late retirement adjustment. MOD's booklet works it through for a member leaving at the 20 and 40 point on a £10,000 deferred pension.

If you leave with a deferred pension only and no EDP, an adjustment is applied when the pension is eventually paid, dividing the early and late retirement factor at your Deferred Pension Age by the factor at 60. It is cost neutral, and without it a deferred-only leaver would get less overall value than someone retiring at 60. Any dependant's benefit is based on the unadjusted amount.

On a medical discharge at Tier 2, Tier 3 or serious ill health, the Added Pension is paid immediately alongside the ill-health pension, is not reduced and does not affect the ill-health enhancements. If you were part way through a scheme year of monthly contributions for member and dependants cover and had not elected to stop, the rest of that year can be credited as though paid. Tier 1 is treated as an early leaver.

On death, member and dependants cover increases dependants' pensions and any lump sum derived from the pension, before or after retirement, and a mid-year monthly contract is again treated as if the rest of the year had been paid. Member-only cover produces no dependant's added pension at all.

Refunds, cancelling and career breaks

Start from the default: the regulations say contributions are not repayable in any circumstances, with two exceptions. This is not a savings account you can raid.

The first exception is the under-two-years case. If you leave before completing two years' qualifying service and so are not entitled to a pension, your Part 7 contributions are repaid, less income tax under the short service refund lump sum charge. The second is a contribution refund elected as an early leaver, again net of that charge. Either way, once a repayment is made your rights under Part 7 are extinguished, so the money comes back and the Added Pension goes with it.

Cancelling a live monthly contract is a different thing from a refund. You may cancel by written notice, and contributions stop for every pay period after the one in which the administrator receives it. You keep a proportionate amount of Added Pension, worked out from the premiums you actually paid over the premiums in the full contribution period, which is the months from election to the end of the scheme year rather than always twelve.

Absence or insufficient pay has three options: stop and keep the proportionate Added Pension, keep paying as though on full pay, or defer the contributions to the scheme year after the absence ends. The third may need a bespoke calculation, so raise it with the scheme rather than assuming a figure.

None of this is a reason to avoid Added Pension. It is a reason to buy it as a long-term commitment out of money you will not need back, and to take regulated advice first if the sums are significant.