Pension expression of wish: the form that decides who gets your pension (UK)

5 September 2026 · Inherit Vault

Your will has nothing to do with your pension. A form you filled in once, probably on your first morning at a job you've long since left, decides who gets it. Almost nobody looks at it again.

Why your will can't reach the pot

Pension death benefits usually sit outside your estate, so a will doesn't touch them. HMRC says it plainly in its own manual: in most cases lump sum death benefits are paid at the discretion of the scheme trustees or provider, even where there's a nomination expressing a wish about who should get the money. Your executor can wave the will at them all day. The trustees still decide. That's also why the pot doesn't wait for probate, unlike most of the rest of what happens to a pension when you die.

The weakness is the entire point

It sounds like a design flaw. It isn't. If a scheme had to obey your nomination, you'd hold what the tax rules call a general power over that money, and HMRC would count it as part of your estate. The discretion is what keeps a death benefit out of the inheritance tax net. The form is worded as a wish because a binding instruction would cost your family money.

Trustees follow it, right up until it stops making sense

In practice trustees pay the named person the overwhelming majority of the time. They're looking at your life on the day you died, though, not the day you signed. A form naming an ex, a partner who moved out years ago, or someone who died before you, is what makes them start asking questions. Then the family ends up in the scheme's complaints process, and after that at The Pensions Ombudsman, which is free but not fast, while nobody can touch the money.

Divorce doesn't rewrite it for you

Get divorced and your will partly updates itself. Section 18A of the Wills Act 1837 treats your ex as though they'd died on the day the marriage ended, so gifts to them simply fail. There's no equivalent rule anywhere for a pension nomination. Nothing revokes it and nothing flags it. Your ex stays on that form until you take them off. Trustees may well look past it, but they don't have to, and the people who lose out only find that out afterwards.

One pot, one form, and you've got more pots than you think

Nominations don't travel between schemes. Since auto-enrolment began in 2012 most people have picked up a separate pot with every employer, each with its own form buried in its own portal. The current job's is usually fine. It's the pension from three jobs ago, still holding the address you had in 2014, that causes the trouble. If you've lost track of one, tracing it is free and takes about ten minutes.

If you're not married, this form is the whole plan

An unmarried partner inherits nothing automatically, and common law marriage is a myth. The nomination is often the only document in existence pointing money at them. Some older schemes still want proof of financial dependency before they'll pay a partner, so read yours instead of assuming. Blended families need the same care. Name people and percentages, because a vague "my children" can quietly mean something you didn't intend.

The tax turns on your age, not on the form

Who gets it is the trustees' call. What it costs isn't. Die under 75 and most lump sums are paid with no tax, provided they're within your lump sum and death benefit allowance, which is £1,073,100. Die at 75 or over and your beneficiary pays income tax at their own rate, deducted by the provider before it reaches them. There's a deadline as well. If a lump sum is paid more than two years after the provider is told about the death, income tax is due on all of it.

What changes on 6 April 2027

From 6 April 2027 most unused pension funds and death benefits get counted in your estate for inheritance tax, and your personal representatives become liable to report and pay it. That doesn't change who receives the pot, the nomination still settles that. It changes what the estate owes afterwards. We've been through the 2027 change in detail, and it's why a form nobody has thought about for a decade suddenly lands on your executor's desk.

Ten minutes, once, and then a habit

Log in to each pension. Look for expression of wish, nomination of beneficiaries, or death benefit nomination, they're all the same thing under different names. Name real people with dates of birth and addresses, and split it in percentages so it still works however the pot grows. Then set yourself a rule: check it again after a marriage, a divorce, a birth, a death, or a house move. Five minutes a scheme, and it's the highest value paperwork you'll ever do.

The form itself is easy. Remembering it exists, across four pensions and thirty years, is the hard bit. Write down which schemes you're in and when you last checked each nomination, and keep that somewhere the person sorting out your affairs will actually find it. Otherwise the money goes wherever a form you can't remember signing tells it to go.

Leave your family a map, not a mystery.

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