How much is an army pension after 30 years?

At 30 years the question changes

Thirty years is past every qualifying threshold the three schemes contain. The two-year minimum, the Resettlement Grant points, both EDP service tests and both AFPS 75 Immediate Pension points are all behind you. So the questions that dominate the shorter service lengths, whether you qualify for anything and whether it is paid now or later, are settled.

What matters instead is how close you are to the point where further service stops adding to the pension, and that answer is completely different in each scheme. An AFPS 75 officer at 30 years is four years from their maximum. An AFPS 75 other rank is seven years from theirs. An AFPS 05 member is ten years from a cap. An AFPS 15 member is not approaching any cap, because the scheme does not have one.

For the headline figure, thirty years of AFPS 05 on a £45,000 final salary gives about £19,286 a year, which is 30/70ths or roughly 42.9% of final pensionable earnings, with an automatic tax-free lump sum of around £57,857. That is a real pension rather than a preserved fragment, and it is the point at which the choices below start to be worth serious money.

AFPS 75: 34 years for officers, 37 for other ranks

AFPS 75 caps reckonable service at 34 years for officers and 37 years for other ranks, and both produce the same maximum pension of 48.5% of representative pay. The two numbers are one rule expressed from two start ages: officer service counts from age 21 and other rank service from 18, and 21 plus 34 and 18 plus 37 both land on 55. That is why the booklet describes the maximum as leaving at 55 or over with a full career behind you.

You will sometimes see 40 years quoted as the AFPS 75 maximum. It is not an AFPS 75 figure at all. Forty years is the AFPS 05 cap, and it is also the cap in the reserve scheme RFPS 05, and it gets misattributed to AFPS 75 from there. If a 40-year AFPS 75 figure has been quoted to you, treat it as an error rather than a variant.

For what a 30-year AFPS 75 pension is actually worth, the sourced points are these: 28.5% of representative pay at 16 years for an officer, 31.83% at 22 years for an other rank, and 48.5% at the 34 or 37 year maximum. Accrual is faster before the Immediate Pension point than after it, so it is not a flat rate per year and multiplying 30 by any single figure gives the wrong answer. MOD publishes accrued pension by rank and service in its own tables, and that is the figure Veterans UK will work from, so ask for it rather than deriving it.

AFPS 05: ten years short of the 40-year cap

AFPS 05 caps the service that counts towards your pension at 40 years, so a full career gives 40/70ths of final pensionable earnings. At thirty years you are ten years short of that, and every further year still adds a full seventieth, so nothing is being wasted by serving on.

In money, on a £45,000 final salary, each extra year of AFPS 05 service adds about £643 a year of pension and around £1,929 to the automatic lump sum. That is the cleanest arithmetic in any of the three schemes, which is why the worked examples on this site use it.

Two AFPS 05 details are worth having straight at this length of service. Final pensionable earnings are the greatest amount of pensionable earnings you received over 365 consecutive days in the last three years of reckonable service, so a promotion late on feeds through fully rather than being averaged away. And the pension age is 55: leave at 55 or over and you get an immediate pension, while leaving between 40 and 55 with your service gives an Early Departure Payment instead.

AFPS 15: no cap, and a tax question instead

AFPS 15 has no maximum service at all. Each year you bank 1/47th of that year's pensionable earnings, revalued annually, and the accrual simply carries on for as long as you serve. Thirty years is about 30/47ths of your career average revalued earnings, roughly 64%, and a 40-year career would be about 85% with nothing in the scheme rules to stop it.

The trade-off is the lump sum. AFPS 15 pays none automatically, so tax-free cash has to be created by commuting pension at the fixed rate of £12 for every £1 of annual pension given up, capped at 25% of your benefits. Using £45,000 as a stand-in for career average earnings, thirty years builds about £28,723 a year. Commuting the full 25% would give up roughly £7,181 a year of pension in exchange for about £86,170 of tax-free cash, leaving an ongoing pension of around £21,542. The reduction is permanent.

Because there is no service cap, the constraint on a long AFPS 15 career is tax rather than scheme rules. Large annual increases in pension value can breach the Annual Allowance, particularly in a year with a significant promotion, and that is a live risk at this length of service rather than a theoretical one. Our Annual Allowance guide covers how the test works and what a pension savings statement is telling you.

Commutation becomes the live decision

At thirty years the useful question is how much of the pension to convert into cash, and each scheme has a different mechanism with different economics. They are easy to confuse because all three are loosely called commutation.

AFPS 15 uses the fixed 12:1 rate described above, capped at 25% of benefits. It is the only one of the three that can be modelled exactly, because the rate does not move with age. AFPS 05 offers the opposite trade, inverse commutation: giving up some or all of the automatic three-times lump sum in exchange for a higher annual pension. That decision has to be made in the six months before the lump sum is due, and the option is void if you die before the pension becomes payable. Our inverse commutation guide covers when it is worth considering.

AFPS 75 has resettlement commutation, which is open to members entitled to leave with an Immediate Pension before 55, so a thirty-year member qualifies. It provides cash now in place of pension that would otherwise be paid between your leaving date and 55, and at 55 the pension is restored to its pre-commutation amount. The rate is set by an age-banded factor issued by the Government Actuary's Department, keyed on your age last birthday at discharge, and the cost of the cash rises steeply the closer to 55 you are. We do not reproduce those factors, because GAD's terms permit linking only. MOD's own warning is blunt: you will end up repaying more than the amount you took. The decision must be made before you leave and is final once processed, so read the resettlement commutation guide and model it on the commutation calculator first.

Timing the exit at this length of service

At thirty years your leaving date drives more of the outcome than your pay does. If you are weighing the date itself, the military retirement calculator runs the same engine framed around when you go rather than how long you served. On AFPS 75 the maximum is built to land at 55, so an officer reaching 34 years or an other rank reaching 37 is also reaching the age at which the pension is uprated for all the inflation since they left and the flat period ends.

On AFPS 05 the line is 55 as well, but it works differently: leave before 55 and you take an Early Departure Payment that bridges to the deferred pension at 65, and leave at 55 or over and you take an immediate pension. On AFPS 15 the equivalent line is 60. So two people with identical thirty-year records can walk away with quite different packages purely because of the date on their discharge.

One more thing to settle before you commit. Thirty years of service spans the McCloud remedy period of 1 April 2015 to 31 March 2022, so you will almost certainly have a choice between your legacy scheme and AFPS 15 for that window, set out in a Remediable Service Statement. That choice can move the figures materially, and it interacts with everything above, so work through the McCloud remedy guide and get an official forecast from Veterans UK before you decide anything.

Run 30 years on your own pay

The worked figures above use a representative salary, so they show the shape of the answer rather than your answer. The army pension calculator takes your own pay, rank and scheme and applies the same rules, and the military pension calculator and MOD pension calculator run the same engine if that wording matches your record better.

Serving beyond 30 years changes the position considerably, because reaching the Immediate Pension or Early Departure Payment point moves you from a preserved pension to money paid now. If you are close to leaving, check where you sit on the Early Departure Payment calculator before you set a date.