Pensions & divorce: how they’re split

British money saved in a glass jar

After deciding what to do with the house and joint mortgage, pensions are usually the biggest thing on the table during a divorce. They are also, routinely, the thing people hand over without quite realising what they've done - because a pension doesn't feel like money in the way a house does, and because the numbers involved are often hard to read.

This page covers how pensions are actually dealt with during a divorce, and the one thing that catches nearly everybody out: an equal split of the headline figure is very often not an equal outcome.

The three ways it can be done

  • Pension sharing. A percentage of one person's pension is transferred to the other, who ends up with a pension of their own. It's the cleanest option and the only one that produces a properly clean break. See more on consent orders here for guidance on a clean financial break in divorce.

  • Offsetting. Nobody's pension is touched. Instead, one person keeps their pension and the other takes more of something else - usually equity in the house. Popular, simple, but riskier than it looks.

  • Pension attachment, sometimes still called earmarking. The pension stays where it is, and a share of the income is paid across when it comes into payment. Rare now, for good reasons covered below.

Pension sharing

A pension sharing order transfers an agreed percentage of one pension to the other person as a pension credit. They then hold it in their own right.

Depending on the scheme, the credit is either kept inside that scheme as a separate membership - an internal transfer - or moved out to a pension of their choosing, an external transfer. Funded occupational schemes are more likely to offer the external route.

Timing. The order is made by the court but only takes effect once the final order is granted. This is one of the main reasons not to rush the final order before the finances are settled, and one of the main reasons the order has to be applied for beforehand.

Implementation then runs for a further four months from the date of the order, or from when the scheme has everything it needs, if that's later. Schemes can ask for longer in particular circumstances.

Charges. Schemes can charge for implementing a share, and the range is wide - anywhere from nothing to several thousand pounds. Ask the scheme what it charges before you agree the split, not afterwards.

What everyone gets wrong: what the pension is worth

Your scheme will give you a cash equivalent value - a CEV, sometimes called a CETV. For a defined contribution pension, a pot of invested money, this is straightforward: it's what's in the pot.

For a defined benefit pension - a final salary or career average scheme, and nearly all public sector pensions - the CETV is a much less reliable number, and it usually understates what the pension is actually worth.

Here's the concrete version. A CETV of £300,000, split fifty-fifty, can leave one person with a retirement income of around £6,000 to £8,000 a year while the other has £20,000 a year, index-linked, with a spouse's pension attached. The same headline number but wildly different outcomes.

That happens because a transfer value is built on conservative assumptions about investment returns and life expectancy, and because it doesn't price the things that make a defined benefit pension valuable - guaranteed increases, inflation protection, survivor benefits.

Splitting the CETV equally is not the same as splitting the pension equally. If one of you is in a public sector scheme, such a the NHS, teaching, police, civil service, armed forces, or local government, then this is the single most important thing for you to think about.

When you need an actuary

A Pensions on Divorce Expert, or PODE, is an actuary who calculates what each pension would actually deliver as retirement income, rather than what it says on the transfer value.

It's usually worth getting one where there's a defined benefit or public sector pension in the picture, where the pensions are substantial - over £100,000 is a common rule of thumb - where there's a significant age gap between you, or where the arrangements are complicated.

It costs several thousand pounds, which is why people skip it. On a pension worth six figures, that's frequently the cheapest spend in the entire divorce.

Is there a pension divorce calculator?

There’s no single pension divorce calculator that will give you a clean and accurate answer to what you owe or are entitled to.

Working out a fair pension split depends on the type of each scheme, the accrual dates, your respective ages, when each of you can take benefits, what income each pot would actually produce, whether you're splitting by value or by income, and what's happening with every other asset. No online tool has that information, and one that produces a confident number from three inputs is giving you a figure that may not stand up in a court of law.

What a calculator can tell you is roughly what a given percentage of a defined contribution pot is worth. For anything with a defined benefit in it, the answer comes from an actuary or it doesn't come at all.

Offsetting, and why it's riskier than it looks

Offsetting is attractive because it's simple: you keep the house, they keep the pension, nobody has to deal with a scheme.

The problem is that a pound of pension is not a pound of cash, and the gap between them is large and moves in several directions at once.

  • Pension money is taxed when you draw it, so the headline value is not what you'd receive

  • You can't touch it until you're 55 - rising to 57 - whereas equity in a house is available now

  • A defined benefit pension carries guarantees that a lump sum doesn't

  • And the CETV problem above means the figure you're offsetting against may be wrong to begin with

None of that makes offsetting the wrong thing to do, necessarily. It's the right answer in plenty of cases, particularly where one person needs a home now more than an income in thirty years. But agreeing it on the basis of two numbers that look comparable, without anyone checking whether they actually are, is how people end up substantially worse off than they realised at the time.

Pension attachment orders

The old approach, and now uncommon. The pension stays with its owner and a share of the income is redirected when it eventually comes into payment.

The reasons it fell out of use are sound: there's no clean break, you're financially tied to your ex until retirement, you have no control over when they take the benefits, and the order typically ends if you remarry, or if they die, unless death benefits were specifically included. Pension sharing does the same job better in almost every case.

What about the State Pension?

Generally, your State Pension can't be shared, even in a divorce.

There's a narrow exception around protected payments and Additional State Pension, depending on when each of you reaches State Pension age and when proceedings started. If you or your ex reached State Pension age before 6 April 2016, it's worth checking. For most people divorcing now, the State Pension simply isn't part of the settlement.

Start the paperwork early

Getting a cash equivalent value can take up to three months - some schemes will do it faster for a fee - and it's one of the most common reason people miss the Form E deadline.

Write to every scheme you've ever paid into before you do anything else, including old ones from jobs you left decades ago. If you can't remember them all, the government's Pension Tracing Service will help, and that takes time too.

Why this matters more than it feels like it does

Pensions are the asset people are most willing to trade away, because retirement is abstract and a house is not. That's particularly true in divorces later in life, where the pension is often worth more than the property and the person with the smaller pension has the least time left to build one.

It's also where the largest gap between men's and women's outcomes tends to appear. Not through anything sinister, but because one person often has decades of accrual and the other took time out, and salaries aren’t always equal, and because the headline numbers are opaque enough that nobody quite realises what's being given up.

If you take one thing from this page: get the valuations, and if there's a defined benefit pension involved, get someone to tell you what it's actually worth before you agree anything.

If you're in Scotland or Northern Ireland

Scotland handles pensions on divorce differently, including how much of a pension counts as matrimonial property and how it's valued, and a pension share can be effected by a qualifying agreement rather than only a court order. Everything above is England and Wales.

Last reviewed: September 2026. This page explains how pensions are dealt with on divorce in England and Wales — it isn't financial or legal advice about yours. Decisions about pensions are among the most consequential in any settlement and warrant proper advice from someone qualified who knows your circumstances.

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