NHS pension errors: what NHSBSA has admitted, and what it means for you

On 2 September 2026 the NHS Business Services Authority put a short page on its website saying it had found NHS pension errors: problems in the way some NHS pensions had been administered. The same afternoon the Minister of State for Health, Karin Smyth, made a written statement to the House of Commons explaining what had happened. Neither document is long. Neither is easy to act on, either. The one question a member wants answered, “is mine one of the wrong ones”, is precisely the question nobody can answer yet.

What is known is narrow but serious. Errors in the administration of member records go back as far as 2008, most of them built up between 2014 and now, and some are still happening. The minister told the Commons that around 95% of members will be unaffected. The Government Actuary’s Department has been brought in to audit the scheme’s administration and work out who the other 5% are. Where a member has lost out, records will be corrected, payments backdated, and interest paid.

This guide sets out what the two documents say, what they carefully avoid saying, and where you stand while the audit runs. It sits alongside our guide to the NHS Pension Scheme, the McCloud remedy tracker, and our running coverage of the NHS McCloud statement backlog.

What the NHSBSA assurance page actually says

NHSBSA’s page is headed “NHS Pensions Service Assurance” and opens with a single sentence that does most of the work: “We’ve identified issues that may have affected pension benefit changes for some NHS Pension Scheme members.”

Further down sits the sentence that matters more, the only place either document ties the problem to a named piece of law:

The review also found areas where some administration processes did not fully comply with scheme rules, including those relating to the Public Service Pension Scheme (PSP) Remedy (also known as McCloud). We have informed the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and The Pensions Regulator of these issues.

Beyond that, the page is a five-step plan: identify potentially affected members, assess the impact, contact those members, complete financial remediation, then apply corrections to the systems so the same thing does not recur. It commits to contacting all affected members “by the end of the year”, and it promises an update on this page “every four weeks”, which puts the first one at around 30 September 2026.

Notice two things the page leaves out. The 95% figure is not on it anywhere; that number is the minister’s, given to Parliament, which is why this article attributes it to her every time it appears. And the page does not say what the errors are. Nor does anything else.

Two documents, one day: the Tennant review is not the errors investigation

Most coverage runs these together, and getting it wrong changes what you think has happened. Two separate pieces of work landed on the same day.

• The Tennant review. In July 2025, after NHSBSA missed its McCloud delivery deadlines, the minister commissioned Lisa Tennant, the independent chair of the NHS Pension Scheme Board, to review NHSBSA’s capacity and capability to deliver the McCloud remedy. Its evidence cut off on 10 April 2026 and the final report went to NHSBSA and the department on 18 May 2026. It was published on 2 September 2026. It is about governance, leadership, operating model and delivery, and its own foreword says it “should be read as an independent assessment of delivery and the systemic conditions affecting it, rather than as an exhaustive audit of every individual case, process, data set or historic administrative issue within the scheme”.
• The administration-errors discovery. This is newer, and it is not what the Tennant review was looking for. Once the McCloud planning work was largely done, NHSBSA started in June 2026 to reassess how the scheme’s rules were being applied in practice. It reported the results to the department at the end of July 2026. The Government Actuary’s Department was appointed in the week of 31 August to audit the scheme’s administration and establish who is affected. That audit has produced nothing public yet.

So the published review is not the investigation into the errors, and the investigation into the errors has not reported. What was published on 2 September was a report about why McCloud delivery went wrong, plus an announcement that something else has been found and is now being looked at.

Alongside the audit, a new Departmental Board has been set up with external and independent expertise to oversee how NHSBSA implements the findings, reporting to the minister. It was due to start meeting in the week of 7 September 2026.

The 95% figure, and the three things it does not tell you

The exact wording, from the written statement, is: “Based on what we know today, around 95% of members will be unaffected. Many of those who are will already be retired and receiving a pension.”

It is a useful number and a limited one, in three ways.

• It is not a headcount. The statement gives a percentage and never converts it into a number of people, and it does not say what total membership the percentage is a share of. Working it out from a published membership figure would be an estimate of ours dressed up as a fact, so this article does not do it.
• It carries its own caveat. “Based on what we know today” is doing real work in that sentence. The audit that will establish the true position had been running for days when the statement was made.
• It says nothing about size. A percentage of members affected tells you nothing about how much any individual pension is out by. No figure for that has been published, in either direction.

The direction of travel is at least clear. The minister’s phrasing is that “while the vast majority of members are receiving the correct pension amount, some will have been entitled to more”, which describes underpayment rather than overpayment.

Nobody has said what the NHS pension errors actually are

NHS pensions have a lot of moving parts that could go wrong: contribution tiers, added pension, ill-health retirement, mental health officer status, transfers in and out, annual allowance calculations, survivor benefits, the pension increase applied each April, and the McCloud remedy calculations themselves. Any of them could produce a member being “entitled to more”.

The public record does not say which. The minister’s phrase is “issues in the administration of a small proportion of members records”. NHSBSA’s phrase is “issues that may have affected pension benefit changes”. The Tennant review does not answer it either, because as its foreword makes clear, that was never its job. We could find no source, official or press, that goes further.

That absence is worth recording rather than filling in. If you read a description somewhere of what specifically has gone wrong, it is worth asking where it came from, because as of 10 September 2026 it did not come from the department, NHSBSA or the published review.

What happens if you turn out to be affected

NHSBSA’s stated process, in its own order, is: identify who may have been affected from member data and administration records; assess the individual cases; contact those members to explain what happened and how it will be put right; complete the financial remediation, which it describes as correcting and backdating payments and paying interest on arrears; and then apply corrections within its systems, with testing, so calculations are right going forward.

Contact will come to you. The page says “you do not need to contact us” and the minister said “each member who is directly affected will be contacted personally by the NHSBSA”. Both documents put the deadline for that contact at the end of 2026.

Pensions in payment are not being suspended while this happens. The minister’s line is that “the NHSBSA will continue to pay pensions promptly and reliably and to process retirement applications”.

What “backdated, with interest” means in the NHS scheme

Neither document sets out a special interest basis for this remediation, which on the current record means the scheme’s normal rule applies. NHSBSA’s published position on late payments is that if a pension or lump sum is not paid within one month, interest is due, and that “interest is calculated based on the bank of England base rates from the date the payment was due to when it was actually paid”.

Two details in the same guidance are worth knowing in advance. Interest is worked out automatically after the corrected award goes into payment, so it is not something you have to claim. Less comfortably, NHSBSA states that “there is no timescale for interest payments to be made”. Arrears and the interest on them can therefore arrive separately, and the second has no published deadline attached.

If a corrected award changes an amount that was already taxed, or shifts a figure used in an annual allowance calculation, that is a separate question from the pension itself, and one where the answer depends on your own tax position. Our guide to McCloud, tax refunds and charges covers how HMRC handles that kind of correction in the remedy context.

Checking your own record: Total Reward Statement or My NHS Pension

Neither document asks you to check anything. But the announcement is a reasonable prompt to open a document most members never look at, and knowing what your record currently says is useful whatever the audit concludes.

Which route you use depends on your employer. Staff at NHS organisations that use the Electronic Staff Record reach a Total Reward Statement, which includes the pension section, through totalrewardstatements.nhs.uk. Members at non-NHS or smaller employers are invited to register for My NHS Pension to see an Annual Benefit Statement instead. Statements are generally refreshed once a year.

Read the service history closely, along with the pay figures used and which section of the scheme each period of service sits in. Our guide to reading a public sector annual benefit statement goes through the fields one at a time, and if you have had a Remediable Service Statement, how to read a McCloud RSS covers that separately.

If you think something is wrong: the NHS pension complaints route

The NHS Pension Scheme has a formal two-stage internal dispute resolution procedure, and it is worth knowing the shape of it before you need it, because the deadlines run in both directions.

1. Stage 1. Started by completing form DRP1. A Disputes Officer reviews the papers and NHSBSA’s own commitment is to “reply within two months or to tell you if we are unable to do so”.
2. Stage 2. If you are dissatisfied with the Stage 1 decision you are entitled to a second review, carried out by a Disputes Manager, again with a two month reply commitment. You have six months from the Stage 1 decision to ask for it, which is the deadline most people miss.
3. The Pensions Ombudsman. NHSBSA’s own guidance is that the Ombudsman “will normally require you to have exhausted NHS Pensions IDR procedure first”. The Ombudsman’s number is 0800 917 4487, with lines open 10.00am to 2.00pm Monday to Friday.

Our guide to using the Pensions Ombudsman covers what the Ombudsman can and cannot do with a maladministration complaint, and what a determination actually gets you.

One thing this disclosure does not do is start a clock. If NHSBSA contacts you and corrects your pension, that is the scheme fixing its own error, not a dispute. The IDR route is for disagreeing with what it then tells you.

What this does to the McCloud remedy timetable

The most consequential sentence in the written statement for anyone waiting on a Remediable Service Statement is short: “In light of the new issues that have been uncovered, I have directed the NHSBSA to re-assess the deliverability of its McCloud plans.”

The one after it says what that means in practice. The minister will set “new statutory deadlines for McCloud when I can do so with confidence”, which is a plain acknowledgement that the current ones are not going to hold and that no replacement date exists yet.

For scale, the Tennant review records that the NHS Pension Scheme has approximately 1.1 million members affected by the McCloud judgment, of whom around 1.05 million require remedy treatment. Against that, and as at the review’s April 2026 evidence cut-off, around 20,600 RSS calculations had been completed including reworks, with around 7,200 cases issued to members.

There is also an uncomfortable line in the review about what happens when an administrator runs hard at a backlog: “BAU quality assurance has slowed as resource was reprioritised. Overpayments increased by approximately £10 million, linked to backlog recovery.” That is a separate finding from the September disclosure and about a different thing, overpayments rather than underpayments, but it points the same way. Clearing a queue quickly and clearing it correctly are competing objectives, and the review found the trade-off being made.

Nothing has been published for a member who already has an RSS or has made a McCloud election. Whether a prior statement could itself be one of the affected records is exactly the question the audit exists to answer, and it has not answered it. We are not going to guess.

The dates that matter

• Around 30 September 2026: the first of NHSBSA’s promised four-weekly updates on the assurance page, counting four weeks from the 2 September publication.
• End of 2026: the date by which NHSBSA says every affected member will have been contacted.
• No date: for the Government Actuary’s Department audit reporting, for new McCloud statutory deadlines, or for interest payments once arrears are paid. All three are open.
• Whenever the minister next updates the House. The statement commits to reporting back on the audit’s progress and findings, and to “regular updates”, without fixing a date.

Common questions

Should I contact NHSBSA to ask whether I am affected?

Both documents say no. The NHSBSA page states “you do not need to contact us” and the minister told the Commons “no action is needed by anyone who is a member of the NHS pension, whether working or retired”. The identification work is being done from member data at NHSBSA’s end, so a phone call from you does not move your case up a queue. Nobody is banned from ringing. It is just not how anyone will be found.

Will my pension stop or be reduced while this is sorted out?

Nothing published suggests so. The minister’s assurance is that NHSBSA “will continue to pay pensions promptly and reliably and to process retirement applications”, and the direction of the errors described is members having been entitled to more rather than less. Neither document mentions recovering money from members over this.

Has this happened before?

Something narrower has. In January 2025 the BMA raised errors in Pension Savings Statements affecting at least 757 doctors, which left members unable to complete their self-assessment returns, and called on NHSBSA to report itself to The Pensions Regulator. That was a different document type, a different mechanism and a far smaller population, so it is precedent rather than the same event. The BMA has a standing page setting out concerns about NHS pension maladministration more generally, on which it says it is “in the process of gaining legal advice on the various maladministration issues across the four nations”.

What have the unions and royal colleges said about this?

As at 10 September 2026, nothing we could find. We looked for a dated public statement from the BMA, the RCN, UNISON, Unite, the GMB and the Royal College of Midwives responding to this specific disclosure and found none. That is an absence eight days after the announcement, not a considered silence, and it may well change.

Is The Pensions Regulator investigating?

TPR has been told. NHSBSA’s page states that it informed both the Department of Health and Social Care and The Pensions Regulator. Whether that has become anything more formal is unknown: TPR’s own press-release listing carried nothing about NHS pensions or NHSBSA when we checked it on 10 September 2026, and it has published no statement on the matter that we could locate.

Does this affect NHS pensions in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland?

The statement was made by a Health minister to the House of Commons about the scheme NHSBSA administers, which is the NHS Pension Scheme for England and Wales. Scotland and Northern Ireland run separate schemes with separate administrators, and neither the statement nor the NHSBSA page says anything about them. Nothing published extends this disclosure beyond the scheme NHSBSA runs.

Pension Plain’s take

The transparency here is real, and it deserves saying. A department that wanted to bury this had an obvious way to do it: publish the Tennant review, which is about a problem everyone already knew about, and say nothing about the new one until the audit reports. Instead the minister told the House about an unquantified problem before anybody had established its size. That is the harder order to do things in.

The difficulty is sequence rather than secrecy. You have been told that something is wrong, that it might be your record, and that you cannot find out and should not ask. That is an honest position and an uncomfortable one to sit in for four months, and it is why the four-weekly update commitment matters more than it looks. It is the only thing in either document that gives you a reason to check back on a known date.

The detail we would most like to see in that first update is the one both documents avoid: what kind of error this is. Not a headcount, which will take the audit, but the mechanism. Members can be told “this affects how added pension was recorded” or “this affects a step in the ill-health calculation” without waiting for anyone to be counted, and that single sentence would let a large number of people work out, correctly, that it almost certainly is not them.

The wider point is the one the Tennant review makes in its own vocabulary. An administrator running an outdated technology estate, a scheme design of considerable complexity and a growing membership was asked to deliver McCloud on top of all of it. The review found quality assurance being traded away to clear backlog. This disclosure is what that trade-off looks like when somebody finally goes back and checks the work.

Fact-checked: 10 September 2026