The master list of sources behind the figures on this site, in plain English. Last updated 16 June 2026.
Every rate and factor we use traces back to a primary official source. We review the figures and update them whenever the rules change, so you can see exactly where each number comes from. For a figure specific to your record, contact Veterans UK.
This site is independent. We are not affiliated with the Ministry of Defence, Veterans UK or JPAC, and nothing here is regulated financial advice. The calculators produce estimates so you can plan and sense-check what you have been told. The only document that decides your actual entitlement is an official forecast from Veterans UK, requested on form 12 while you are serving or form 14 once your pension is preserved. We explain our standards in full in our editorial policy, and the maths behind each figure in how we calculate. This page is the evidence trail that sits underneath both.
Armed forces pensions are governed by statute, not by rules of thumb. There are three schemes in play, and the differences between them are large enough that quoting the wrong number can mislead someone planning their resettlement. AFPS 75 is a final-salary scheme worth up to 48.5% of final pay, reached at 34 years for officers and 37 years for other ranks, with an automatic tax-free lump sum of three times the pension and a normal pension age of 60. AFPS 05 is also final-salary, building at 1/70th of final pay for each year up to roughly 57%, again with an automatic three times lump sum, an Early Departure Payment, and a normal pension age of 65. AFPS 15 is a career average (CARE) scheme that banks 1/47th of your pensionable pay each year, revalues each year's slice for inflation, pays no automatic lump sum, lets you commute up to 25% of the pension at roughly £12 of lump sum for each £1 of pension given up, and has a normal pension age equal to your State Pension age. Because each scheme treats accrual, lump sums and pension age differently, every number we show is tied to a named source so you can check it against your own scheme rather than a generic figure.
These are the primary, government-published sources. They set the accrual rates, normal pension ages, Early Departure Payment rules, commutation factors and lump sums our calculators apply.
The gov.uk Armed Forces pensions collection is the front door to everything the MOD publishes about the schemes, and Discover My Benefits is the MOD's plain-English version of the same rules. Together they are our anchor for the headline features of each scheme: the accrual rate, the normal pension age, whether a lump sum is automatic or has to be created by commutation, and the broad eligibility tests for Early Departure Payments. When the two scheme pages we link to above describe AFPS 15 as building 1/47th of pay a year with no automatic lump sum, or AFPS 75 as reaching 48.5% of final pay with an automatic three times lump sum, those are the statements we encode into the calculator's defaults. We treat these pages as the description of intent and the booklets and JSP 764 as the legal detail, then make sure the two agree before a figure goes live.
The AFPS "Your Scheme Explained" booklets and Joint Service Publication 764, the Tri-Service Resettlement and Employment Support manual's pension counterpart, are where the rules stop being summaries and become specifics. JSP 764 and the statutory scheme rules behind it are what we use to pin down the awkward edges: how pensionable earnings are defined, how part years and breaks in service are treated, the exact qualifying tests for EDP, and how preserved pensions behave. For example, the EDP gates we apply, broadly 18 years of service and age 40 for AFPS 05 and 20 years and age 40 for AFPS 15, come from this layer rather than from a summary page. The same is true of the two year minimum qualifying service needed before any pension is payable at all. When a calculator has to make a decision a one-line summary cannot answer, this is the source we reach for.
The conversion factors that turn one form of benefit into another are set by the Government Actuary's Department, not by us. Two matter most for these calculators. The first is the commutation factor: the rate at which giving up £1 of annual pension produces a one-off tax-free lump sum. On AFPS 15 you can commute up to 25% of your pension at roughly £12 of lump sum for each £1 of pension surrendered, and that £12 is a GAD factor that depends on age. The second is the EDP factor that determines the size of the AFPS 15 EDP lump sum, which is 2.25 times the preserved pension, alongside the monthly income stream paid until pension age. Because GAD reviews and reissues these factors periodically, we date-stamp the set we are using and check for a newer version whenever we revisit the page. We label any commutation result as illustrative, because your own factor depends on your exact age at the point you take the benefit.
Veterans UK administers the schemes and issues the only figures that are binding on your record. No calculator, including ours, can see your service history, your exact pensionable pay, or how your time splits across schemes under the McCloud remedy. That is why we point you to Veterans UK for the figure that counts: form 12 produces an official forecast while you are still serving, and form 14 does the same once your pension is preserved. We use Veterans UK material to keep our descriptions of the request process accurate, and we never present an estimate from this site as a substitute for that forecast.
Pensions in payment and preserved pensions are increased each April under the Pensions Increase (Review) Order, which follows the Consumer Prices Index figure from the previous September. This single number ripples through several parts of a forecast, so we track it carefully and date-stamp it. The recent run shows how much it can move: the April 2024 increase was 6.7%, April 2025 was 1.7%, and April 2026 is 3.8%. CPI also drives the revaluation of each year's slice of an AFPS 15 CARE pension while you are still serving, although that in-service revaluation can use a different measure from the in-payment uprating, which is one reason we keep the two clearly separate in the calculator.
We cross-check our reading of the rules against trusted secondary sources. These explain the schemes in plain English and help us confirm details such as pension ages and accrual.
MoneyHelper, the free and impartial service from the government-backed Money and Pensions Service, is our reference for general pensions concepts that sit around the scheme rules: how tax-free lump sums work, how commutation trades income for cash, and how State Pension age interacts with a scheme pension age. The Forces Pension Society is an independent membership body whose technical staff specialise in these exact schemes, so we use their published guidance to sanity-check how a rule plays out in practice rather than only on paper. The single-service families federations and the White Ensign Association translate the same rules for their communities, which is useful for catching anywhere our wording has drifted from how serving people actually describe their pension. We treat all of these as confirmation, never as the origin of a figure: if a secondary source and a primary source disagree, the primary source wins and we investigate the gap.
A number does not go into a calculator on the strength of one page. Our routine has three steps. First, we establish the rule from a primary official source: the gov.uk scheme page or Discover My Benefits for the headline, then JSP 764 and the scheme booklets for the detail. Second, we confirm we have read it correctly by checking it against at least one independent expert source such as the Forces Pension Society or MoneyHelper. Third, we test the encoded figure with a worked example and compare the output against any example published by an official or expert source. Where they line up, the figure ships with a date stamp. Where they do not, we hold it back and trace the difference, because a mismatch usually means a factor has been updated, a definition is narrower than it first appeared, or a rule has an exception we had not captured.
Here is the kind of check we run, using round numbers so the method is clear. The figures below are illustrative and are not a forecast of anyone's pension. Take a member with an AFPS 15 pension of £10,000 a year who wants to commute the maximum 25% for a tax-free lump sum. We start from the primary rule: AFPS 15 allows commutation up to 25% at roughly £12 of lump sum for each £1 of pension given up. Twenty-five per cent of £10,000 is £2,500 of pension surrendered. Multiplying £2,500 by the £12 GAD factor gives a lump sum of about £30,000, and the remaining pension falls to £7,500 a year. We then cross-check the shape of that trade against MoneyHelper's explanation of how commutation works and against the Forces Pension Society's description of the AFPS 15 commutation limit. Because the real factor varies with age, we label the £30,000 as illustrative and tell the reader their own figure comes from Veterans UK. That final step, refusing to present an illustrative figure as a personal forecast, is as much part of the process as the arithmetic.
Every page carries a last updated date, and the figures behind it are tied to that date so you can see how current they are. We work on a fixed annual cycle plus event-driven updates. The fixed point is each April, when the Pensions Increase (Review) Order and the new CPI uprating take effect; we refresh the uprating figure, the worked examples that depend on it, and any in-payment increase wording at that point. The event-driven updates happen whenever a source changes outside that cycle: a new set of GAD factors, an amendment to JSP 764 or the scheme rules, or a further stage of the McCloud remedy, whose remedy period runs from 1 April 2015 to 31 March 2022 and continues to affect how members' service is allocated between schemes. When any of these moves, we re-run the cross-check above before changing a published number, and we change the last updated date only when the underlying figures actually change, not on a schedule, so the date stamp stays meaningful.
No. The figures on this site are accurate estimates built from official sources, but they are not your personal entitlement. Only Veterans UK can issue that, on form 12 while you are serving or form 14 once your pension is preserved. Use our numbers to plan and to question anything that looks wrong, then confirm against an official forecast.
No. We are completely independent and have no affiliation with the Ministry of Defence, Veterans UK or JPAC. We are also not regulated to give financial advice. We cite official sources so you can verify every figure yourself, and we send you to the official channels for anything binding.
Because they earn their place differently. gov.uk and JSP 764 tell us what the rules are. Bodies such as the Forces Pension Society and MoneyHelper help us confirm we have read those rules correctly and explained them in a way that matches how the schemes work in practice. If the two ever disagree, we follow the official source and look into why.
We use the most recent Pensions Increase figure, which is 3.8% from April 2026, following 1.7% in 2025 and 6.7% in 2024. We refresh it every April when the new order takes effect and date-stamp the change so you can see exactly which uprating a figure reflects.
Want to see how we turn these sources into numbers? Read how we calculate for the method, and our editorial policy for the standards we hold ourselves to. Last updated 16 June 2026.