Why they pile up
Since automatic enrolment began in 2012, an employer has had to put you into a workplace pension and pay into it alongside you. That is a good thing. It also means a new pot, with a new provider, every time you move.
Nothing consolidates them. There is no central account, no statement that adds them up, no letter that arrives saying “here is everything you have.” Each provider knows only about the pot it holds. If you have had five jobs since 2012, the default outcome is five pots, five logins, five sets of paperwork going to whichever address you lived at when you left.
The pots you forget are usually the small ones from short stints — eighteen months somewhere, a year somewhere else. A pot of £4,000 left alone for twenty-five years is not nothing, and it is exactly the kind of pot that goes missing.
What the scattering costs
Three things, none of them dramatic on its own.
You cannot answer the question. The one that matters — am I on track? — needs a total. Five statements arriving at five different times of year, in five different formats, do not produce one. Most people never build it, so most people are guessing.
Charges vary, and you cannot see it. Each scheme has its own annual charge. Old schemes are often more expensive than current ones, and small dormant pots sometimes attract flat fees that eat a larger proportion of a small balance. You cannot compare what you cannot see side by side.
Here is what a difference in charges does over time. Take a £30,000 pot, left untouched for twenty years, growing at 3% a year before charges. Run it twice, changing nothing but the annual charge: at 0.4% it ends around £50,200, and at 0.9% around £45,500. The half a percent costs roughly £4,700.
That is arithmetic, not a forecast. The 3% is an assumption picked to make the sum concrete, not a prediction — nobody knows what the next twenty years return, and a different growth rate gives a different gap. What survives the choice of assumption is the shape: the charge compounds against you every year, silently, on a pot you are not looking at.
Your money may be sitting in the wrong default. Every workplace scheme has a default fund, and it is chosen for the average member of that scheme — not for you, and not for the you of fifteen years later. A pot you have not looked at since 2014 is still invested according to a decision you did not make.
Finding the ones you have lost
The government runs a free service for exactly this problem: the Pension Tracing Service. You give it an employer's name, it gives you current contact details for the scheme that employer used. It will not tell you what is in the pot — it reconnects you with the provider, and you ask them.
It works best if you can list your employers, which is harder than it sounds for jobs two decades back. Two things help: your National Insurance record on GOV.UK shows the years you paid contributions, which jogs the memory about who you worked for and when, and old payslips or P60s name the scheme directly.
You will also want the pot's scheme type, because it changes everything about what happens next. Most modern workplace pensions are defined contribution: a pot of money with your name on it. Some older ones — particularly pre-2000, particularly public sector or large employers — are defined benefit, promising an income rather than holding a pot. Those are usually far more valuable than they look and come with strong regulatory protection around transferring them.
The part people get wrong
The obvious move, once you can see five pots, is to roll them into one. One login, one charge, one number to watch. Sometimes that is exactly right.
But some older schemes carry benefits that do not survive a transfer, and they are rarely mentioned on the form:
- A guaranteed annuity rate, promising to convert your pot into income at a rate far better than today's market.
- A protected pension age, letting you draw earlier than the normal minimum.
- Life cover attached to scheme membership, which lapses when you leave.
- Guaranteed minimum pension entitlements from contracted-out schemes.
Any of these can be worth more than every fee saving consolidation would give you, combined. They are also invisible unless you ask the provider directly, in writing, whether the policy carries safeguarded benefits.
So the sequence that avoids the expensive mistake is: find the pots, ask each provider what the pot is worth and whether it carries any guarantee, and only then think about whether joining them up makes sense. Transferring is easy to do and impossible to undo.
The question worth taking to an adviser
Not “should I consolidate my pensions” — that is unanswerable without seeing all of them.
Which of my pots carry safeguarded benefits, and what are they worth compared with what I would save in charges?
That is a question an adviser can actually answer, and it is the one that decides everything else. If any pot with a guarantee is worth more than £30,000, regulated advice is not optional — it is a legal requirement before you can transfer.
Tessera is an information tool, not financial advice. Advice comes from the FCA-authorised advisers you invite.