Should You Opt Out of the Police Pension?

The true cost of opting out — a worked example

The headline number officers usually focus on is their own contribution. Say you're a constable earning £35,000 in pensionable pay. Opting out would put your own contribution, at the 12.88% tier, back into your gross pay, which after tax and National Insurance would increase your take-home pay by a noticeable amount each month.

But that's only half the picture, and the smaller half at that. While you're in the scheme, your employer is separately paying in 35.3% of your pensionable pay on that same salary. This is not money that's "yours" to reclaim by opting out; it isn't sitting in an account waiting for you, and it isn't added to your salary if you leave the scheme. It simply stops being paid at all. Opting out doesn't convert that 35.3% into cash in your pocket — it just switches it off.

So the true cost of opting out isn't just what you'd save in your own contributions. It's the combined loss of your own contribution's pension value plus the employer's far larger share, which together were buying you a slice of guaranteed, inflation-linked pension every single year. Very few realistic private savings or investment plans could replicate that value, because nowhere else will anyone pay that much in on your behalf every month, guaranteed, with no investment risk attached.

If you want to see what this looks like for your own salary and rank, the Police Pay Calculator and Pension Calculator on this site can show you both the monthly cash difference and the pension value you'd be giving up, side by side.

What you actually lose beyond the money

The financial cost is the headline, but opting out also means giving up several forms of protection that are easy to overlook until you actually need them.

The most obvious loss is the CPI+1.25% guaranteed revaluation on your accrued pension, explained in detail in our Police Pension 2015 (CARE) Explained guide. This gives every year's pension slice a guaranteed real-terms increase, with zero investment risk, for as long as you're a scheme member. Nothing comparable exists in the ordinary savings or investment market — even a well-performing stocks and shares ISA carries genuine risk of loss, particularly over short periods, whereas the pension's revaluation is contractual and doesn't depend on markets at all.

Less obvious, but arguably more important day to day, is the death-in-service and ill-health protection that comes bundled into scheme membership — cover that disappears the moment you opt out.

The ill-health retirement provision works the same way. If you become permanently unable to continue as a police officer, or unable to work at all, due to injury or illness, scheme membership provides an enhanced pension assessed through the Selected Medical Practitioner process. Opting out removes this safety net entirely — a genuinely serious risk to weigh for a role that carries above-average physical and occupational risk compared with most civilian jobs.

None of these protections show up on a monthly payslip, which is exactly why they're easy to underweight when the decision is being driven by short-term cash pressure.

The rare scenarios where opting out might make sense

It would be dishonest to say opting out is never sensible — there are a small number of genuine situations where it can be a reasonable choice, though they're the exception rather than the rule.

A short, clearly time-limited period of severe financial hardship is one example — for instance, a temporary gap where an officer needs every possible pound of take-home pay to avoid missing essential payments, with a firm plan to opt back in once the pressure passes. Even here, it's worth exploring every other option first (advances, hardship support through the Police Federation, budgeting help), because the pension cost of even a short gap compounds over a full career.

Unusual personal tax or financial planning circumstances can also occasionally make opting out defensible — for example, an officer who is very close to, or already exceeding, the pension Annual Allowance and facing a tax charge as a result (more common at Superintendent rank and above, or after a large pay increase or transfer-in of service), might have specific reasons to reduce further accrual, though this is a niche situation and usually needs professional advice rather than a blanket opt-out decision.

An officer with very unusual personal circumstances — for instance, a serious terminal diagnosis where the long-term value of a retirement pension is far less relevant than immediate cash — might also rationally weigh things differently. These are genuinely rare cases, and none of them describe the situation most officers are actually in when they first consider opting out, which is ordinary short-term cash flow pressure.

How to weigh the decision properly

Rather than making the decision based on how tight this month's budget feels, it's worth deliberately separating out short-term cash flow problems from long-term pension value, because they're genuinely different problems requiring different solutions.

Start by working out your actual current shortfall — how much extra you need each month, and for how long you expect to need it. Compare that against the true monthly value you'd be giving up (your contribution plus the employer's 35.3%, not just your own contribution), which the Pension Calculator on this site can help quantify. In most cases the gap between "cash I need now" and "pension value I'd be giving up" is large enough that other options — reducing discretionary spending, picking up overtime (paid at time-and-a-third or higher, and non-pensionable so it doesn't affect your pension contribution rate), a short-term budgeting plan, or support through the Police Federation — are worth exhausting first.

If, after that, opting out still looks like the right call for your circumstances, at least go in with your eyes open about what you're giving up, and treat it as a genuinely temporary measure with a plan to rejoin, rather than a permanent decision made under short-term pressure. This is exactly the kind of decision where a conversation with your force's pension team, or independent financial guidance, is worth the time it takes — the numbers involved, compounded over a career, are large enough to justify it.

Rejoining the scheme if you change your mind

If you do opt out and later decide you want back in, it's usually possible to rejoin the Police Pension Scheme, though the exact process and any conditions can vary, so it's essential to check directly with your force's pension administrator rather than assuming.

In most cases, rejoining means you simply resume active membership and start accruing pension again from that point forward, at your current pensionable pay. What you generally cannot do is retrospectively "buy back" the pension you would have accrued during the period you were opted out — that period is typically just a gap in your pension record, with no benefit added for it, unless specific transitional or buy-back arrangements happen to apply in your case.

This is worth being clear-eyed about: every month spent outside the scheme is not a pause that gets reversed later, it's a permanent gap in your total pension. A five-year opt-out early in a career, even if you rejoin afterwards, permanently removes five years of 1/55.3 accrual and five years of employer-funded, inflation-linked growth that simply cannot be recreated once the opportunity has passed.

If you're currently opted out, or thinking about it, and want to model what rejoining now versus staying out for longer would mean for your eventual pension, the Pension Calculator on this site lets you compare different scenarios using your own salary and service history, which is a much more useful basis for the decision than a general rule of thumb.

Common myths about opting out

A few misconceptions come up repeatedly when officers discuss opting out, and it's worth addressing them directly, because they can push people towards a decision based on inaccurate assumptions.

The first is the idea that opting out is "getting your pension money back." It isn't. Your own contributions simply stop being deducted, and your pay increases by that amount, but nothing is paid to you to compensate for the employer's 35.3% contribution, which just stops altogether. Nobody hands you a cheque for the employer share — it's foregone entirely, not redirected.

A second common myth is that opting out is a neutral, easily reversible decision, similar to pausing a subscription. As explained above, rejoining doesn't restore the gap — the years spent outside the scheme are permanently missing from your accrual, with no way to buy them back in most circumstances. Treating an opt-out as "just for now, I'll sort it later" often means the gap becomes longer than intended, simply because life gets busy and rejoining paperwork doesn't happen as quickly as people assume.

A third misconception is that the pension isn't worth much if you don't serve a full 30-year career. Because PPS 2015 is a CARE scheme rather than a final salary scheme, every single year you're a member adds a genuine, permanent slice of pension value, regardless of how long your total career turns out to be. Even five or ten years of membership, followed by a career change, leaves you with a real, growing preserved pension — it isn't an all-or-nothing benefit that only pays off after decades of service. This is covered in more detail in our guide on what happens to your pension if you leave the police early.

Being clear on what opting out does and doesn't do is an important part of making a decision you won't regret, rather than one based on a misunderstanding of how the mechanics actually work.

A quick checklist before you decide

If you're seriously weighing up whether to opt out, it can help to work through a short set of questions before making a final decision, rather than acting purely on how tight this month's finances feel.

First, have you calculated the full monthly value you'd be giving up, including both your own contribution and the employer's 35.3%, using the Police Pay Calculator or Pension Calculator on this site, rather than just looking at the deduction on your payslip? Second, have you explored other ways of easing short-term pressure, such as overtime, budgeting support, or speaking to the Police Federation, before concluding that opting out is the only option? Third, if you do have dependants, have you thought through what would happen to them financially if you died or were seriously injured while opted out, given that death-in-service and ill-health protection would no longer apply? Fourth, do you have a genuine, realistic plan and rough timeframe for rejoining, rather than an open-ended intention to sort it out eventually?

If you've thought through all of that and opting out still seems like the right call for your specific circumstances, at least you'll be making an informed decision rather than a reactive one — and that's really the goal of this guide, not to tell you what to do, but to make sure the decision reflects the true size of what's at stake.