How much is an army pension after 4 years?

Four years earns a pension you will not see for decades

On AFPS 05, four years on a £45,000 final salary gives about £2,571 a year, with an automatic tax-free lump sum of around £7,714. Both numbers are easy to work out and neither is the interesting part. The number that decides what four years is actually worth to you is the gap between the day you leave and the day the money arrives.

Work it through for a realistic case. Someone who joins at 18 and leaves at 22 with four years' service holds an AFPS 15 deferred pension payable at State Pension age. That is more than forty years of waiting. The pension is real, it is protected, and for most of your working life it will do nothing except sit there.

So the four-year question is a question about time rather than arithmetic. Three things decide the outcome: which age your scheme pays the benefit at, whether it holds its value in the meantime, and whether you remember it exists when the age arrives. All three are covered below.

AFPS 05: why 55 is the pension age and 65 is your payment age

AFPS 05's Normal Pension Age is 55. That statement is true, it appears in the scheme booklet, and it misleads more short-service leavers than anything else in the scheme. What it means is narrow: if you are still serving and you leave at 55 or over, you get an immediate pension. It does not mean that a pension you earned at 22 and left behind becomes payable at 55.

A preserved AFPS 05 pension has its own age, which the booklet calls the pension benefit age, and that age is 65. On the four-year example, the £2,571 and the £7,714 are payable at 65, not at 55. If you have read that AFPS 05 pays at 55 and planned around it, that is the correction to make.

You can bring a preserved AFPS 05 pension forward to 55, but not for free. Taking it ten years early means it is actuarially reduced, permanently, because the scheme is paying it for ten more years. So 55 is available as a choice rather than as an entitlement, and it costs you income for the rest of your life. Our preserved pension calculator shows the unreduced figure for your own pay and service.

When each scheme actually pays a preserved pension

AFPS 75. Preserved benefits split on a date rather than a scheme rule. Service up to and including 6 April 2006 is normally payable at 60, and service after that date at 65. A single award can therefore be paid in two stages, at two different ages, which is worth knowing before you assume one claim settles everything.

AFPS 05. Payable at 65, as above, with the option to draw from 55 at a permanent reduction. AFPS 15. Payable at your State Pension age, again with the option to draw from 55 at a permanent reduction. The AFPS 15 age moves with State Pension age legislation rather than being fixed by the scheme, so someone in their twenties today should not treat it as settled.

Four years of service can straddle more than one of these. Anyone who was serving on 1 April 2022 moved into AFPS 15 on that date, and anyone with service between 1 April 2015 and 31 March 2022 has a McCloud remedy choice for that period, set out in a Remediable Service Statement. If you are not certain which scheme holds your four years, which AFPS scheme am I in is the place to start.

What stops the figure withering while it waits

A preserved pension is not frozen at the amount printed on your discharge paperwork. It is revalued each year in line with prices for the whole time it is held, and once it comes into payment it rises with CPI annually. The April 2026 increase was 3.8%, following 1.7% in 2025 and 6.7% in 2024.

One uplift on the four-year example takes £2,571 to about £2,669. Repeated over decades, that revaluation is the difference between a pension that means something and a pension that has been quietly eroded to nothing. It is the main reason a small preserved benefit is still worth tracking rather than writing off.

Be clear about what revaluation is for, though. It is designed to hold the buying power of the pension, not to grow it, so four years of service will still be four years of service when you reach pension age. It will simply be four years of service expressed in the money of that decade rather than this one.

Taking it early, and the small-pension route

Drawing early is possible on both of the schemes a recent four-year leaver is likely to be in. On AFPS 15 you can take deferred benefits from 55 with a permanent actuarial reduction, and on AFPS 05 you can bring the preserved pension forward from 55 on the same basis. On a benefit this size the money involved either way is modest, but the principle holds: earlier means smaller, for life.

There is a second route that is genuinely relevant at four years, because it applies to small pensions and four years of service produces one. Trivial commutation lets you take the whole benefit as a one-off payment between age 55 and 75 if one pension is worth £10,000 or less, or if your total pension savings across all schemes are £30,000 or less. If you left before 1 April 2017 it is only available from State Pension age.

It is all or nothing. Taking trivial commutation extinguishes every further right under the scheme, for you and for your dependants, so it is not a partial cash-out and there is no going back. It suits someone whose armed forces pension is a genuinely small fragment of their retirement rather than someone with several small pensions that add up.

Preserved pensions are claimed, not delivered

This is where four-year benefits are most often lost. A preserved pension is not paid automatically when you reach the age. You have to claim it from Veterans UK, and if the scheme has an address for you from four decades earlier, nobody is going to chase you about it.

Two pieces of admin protect it. Keep your discharge documentation and any annual benefit statement somewhere you will still be able to find in thirty years, because they are the simplest evidence of what you built. And if you want an official figure rather than an estimate, request a forecast from Veterans UK using form 14, which is the form for a preserved pension, rather than form 12, which is for serving members.

In the meantime, the preserved pension guide covers how claiming works and how the revaluation is applied, and the four-year figure for your own pensionable pay takes a few seconds to check. A small pension you know about is worth considerably more than a slightly larger one you have forgotten.

Run 4 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 4 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.