UK confirms 2026 DB pension revaluation percentages

Planning to draw a final salary (defined benefit) pension in 2026? The government has set the official figures that grow a deferred pension while you wait. The Occupational Pensions (Revaluation) Order 2025 was made on 19 November 2025, laid before Parliament on 21 November, and takes effect on 1 January 2026. It applies in England, Wales and Scotland and was signed for the Secretary of State by Torsten Bell at the Department for Work and Pensions. The Order covers people reaching their scheme’s normal pension age in 2026.

Revaluation is the legal uplift applied to a deferred DB pension between the day you leave the scheme and the day you reach the scheme’s normal pension age. UK law sets out methods for doing this; most final salary schemes use the “final salary method”, which adds a revaluation amount to the benefit you had at leaving, based on percentages specified each year by the Secretary of State.

Those percentages come in two flavours in the legislation. The “higher” revaluation percentage applies to service before 6 April 2009 and is capped at 5% a year; the “lower” percentage applies to service from 6 April 2009 and is capped at 2.5% a year. Parliament created this split in the Pensions Act 2008; section 101 took effect on 6 April 2009, which is why older and newer service are treated differently.

Inflation is the engine behind the Order. Since 2011 the government has built these percentages from the Consumer Prices Index (CPI), having previously used the Retail Prices Index (RPI). DWP statements in 2010–2011 confirm the switch to CPI for the statutory minimum revaluation and explain that the annual Order uses price changes up to the previous September.

What does that give you for this year’s single‑year entry? CPI to September 2025 was 3.8%, so the 2025 row in the Order shows 3.8% for the “higher” percentage; the “lower” percentage is 2.5% because of the statutory cap for post‑2009 service. In short, if you have only post‑2009 service, the maximum statutory uplift for 2025 is 2.5%; any pre‑2009 service uses 3.8%.

The Order prints a long table of cumulative percentages, one for each complete “revaluation period” starting 1 January 1986 and ending 31 December 2025. The “lower” column only appears for revaluation periods that start on or after 1 January 2009, because there is no 2.5% cap to apply before then. This structure mirrors the explanatory note to previous Orders and is unchanged this year.

Example 1. You left in 2023 and your scheme’s normal pension age falls in 2026. Your revaluation period is the two years from 1 January 2024 to 31 December 2025. The Order gives a 5.6% “higher” percentage for that span and 5.1% for the “lower”. So a £6,000 slice earned before April 2009 becomes £6,336, while the portion earned from April 2009 grows by 5.1% over the same span.

Example 2. You left in 2020. Your revaluation period is 1 January 2021 to 31 December 2025. The Order lists 27.6% for the “higher” percentage and 13.1% for the “lower”. Apply those to the relevant parts of your benefit: £4,000 built before April 2009 becomes £5,104, while £4,000 built from April 2009 becomes £4,524. These are statutory minima; your scheme may promise more.

If your scheme’s rules hard‑wire RPI or use their own formula, you might see a different result. When the statutory measure moved to CPI in 2011, ministers said schemes could keep more generous rules and that CPI should not become an automatic underpin for schemes that stay with RPI. Your next step is simple: check your booklet or ask the administrator what your rules say.

This Order does not set the revaluation used by modern public service career‑average schemes while you are still building pension. For those, HM Treasury makes a separate annual Order. For 2025 it set 1.7% for prices and 4.5% for earnings; departments then apply the figure each scheme uses. That is a different system from the one in this DB Order.

You may also hear about rises on pensions already in payment. The same annual machinery underpins the statutory minimum increases paid by many private DB schemes once a pension starts, often called Limited Price Indexation. The one‑year figure derived from CPI feeds through, but your actual increase depends on your accrual dates and scheme rules.

What you can do now. Check your normal pension age and how your service splits before and after 6 April 2009 so you know which percentage applies to each slice. Keep the timing in mind: the 2025 single‑year figure reflects CPI to September 2025 and the Order takes effect from 1 January 2026. If anything in your statement looks off, ask your administrator to show the calculation.