How much is enough? The pension question nobody can answer.

We ask a lot of questions in employee one-to-ones. This is the one we get asked back, almost every time, usually with a slightly sheepish laugh.

Hardly anyone knows their number. Not their pot, not their projection, but the actual figure they will need to live on. In our experience that often includes the people who designed the scheme.

It isn’t a hard question. It is just one that nobody has ever answered for them.

Start with the salary

Two things make the answer workable.

The first is the State Pension. In 2026/27 the full amount is £12,548 a year, and it is flat. It is based on your National Insurance record rather than your earnings, so your CFO and your newest recruit are heading for exactly the same figure.

The second is that nobody needs 100% of their salary in retirement. No commute, no pension contributions coming out of your pay, hopefully no mortgage. But you don’t need the same proportion as everyone else either, because the basics cost roughly the same whatever you earn. They simply swallow far more of a modest salary. So lower earners need to replace more of their pay, and higher earners less.

The Department for Work and Pensions puts rough numbers on it:

Salary (per year) and share of salary needed in retirement
Up to £12,199 - 80%
£12,200 to £22,399 - 70%
£22,400 to £31,999 - 67%
£32,000 to £51,299 - 60%
£51,300 and above - 50%

Someone on £20,000 might aim for around £14,000 a year. Someone on £80,000 could live well on £40,000 in today’s money.

So what if everyone knew their number?

What could you do as an HR team to help?

You already spend real money on your pension scheme. Most of your people have no idea whether it gets them anywhere. They cannot tell you their target, their projected income, or the gap between the two, so they treat the whole thing as a deduction on a payslip rather than a benefit you are funding.

Give them the number and that changes. People who can see a gap behave differently. They look at where their money is invested. They take up matching you are already paying for. They think twice before opting out. They ask better questions, and they start asking them years earlier than they otherwise would.

The spend hasn’t moved. The value of it has.

It changes the internal conversation too. Once you can see which groups are on track and which are nowhere near, contribution structure stops being a cost line and becomes a design decision, which is what it always was.

One useful thing to do in Pension Awareness week?

Provide a number and an explainer (use the table above), for each person, based on their own salary. It’s not advice, you can lean on the government’s numbers and its genuinely useful.

Figures are for the 2026/27 tax year. The illustrations above are general and for information only; they are not personal financial advice and individual circumstances will vary.