Update, 2 September 2026. There is a newer statement count, and it is not on the same basis as the one in this article. The Ministry of Defence published a Remediable Service Statement delivery update on 26 August 2026. As at 17 August it puts the total issued at 99,077 and says 11,770 immediate choice statements are still to come, 4,429 being processed and 7,350 awaiting assessment. The next update is due in December 2026, and still no completion date is given.
Do not subtract one figure from the other. The delivery update says it now counts only one type of statement per member, and that statements produced for deferred members it cannot trace have been removed from the reported volume. The audited annual report figures below, 98,554 sent and 38,060 outstanding as at 22 June 2026, are counted differently and cover every cohort, where the 11,770 covers one. No all-cohort outstanding total is published this time, so the honest position is that the audited figure remains the last published measure of the whole backlog.
One new fact, and it is the actionable one. The scheme says 1,566 statements cannot be sent because it holds no current address: it “cannot send your RSS to you until your details are updated”. If you left the forces, moved, and have never had an initial statement, giving Veterans UK a current address is what unblocks it.
Educational, not advice. This article explains what the Armed Forces Pension Scheme’s annual report for 2025/26 says, and what it means if you are a serving member, a veteran with a preserved pension, or the family of one. It is general information, not personal financial advice, and Pension Plain is not authorised or regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. For free and impartial guidance, see MoneyHelper. For questions about your own Armed Forces pension, the contact details are near the end of this article.
In short
- The Ministry of Defence published the Armed Forces Pension Scheme (AFPS) Annual Report and Accounts 2025/26 on 15 July 2026. It is audited, and the auditor’s findings are the most striking part.
- The McCloud remedy statement programme has missed both of its deadlines. As at 22 June 2026, 98,554 statements had been sent and 38,060 were still outstanding, with no completion date given. A later delivery update, on 26 August 2026, gives 99,077 issued as at 17 August and 11,770 immediate choice statements outstanding, counted on a different basis (see the update box above).
- Two data reviews found member records that had been left out of the scheme’s data for years, together adding roughly £95 million of pension liability that had not previously been counted.
- The Comptroller and Auditor General states that the scheme “has continued to fail to discharge its statutory obligations” to tell certain early leavers about their rights, a duty in place since April 2006.
- The number of Armed Forces pensions that are due but unclaimed rose to 17,018, from 15,113 a year earlier. These are not paid automatically. If you have a preserved AFPS pension, you have to claim it.
- The £5.1 million of overpaid pensions the report identifies is being reclaimed from the veterans who received it. More than 1,000 have been asked to repay, in some cases through years of reduced monthly pension. Treasury rules require recovery regardless of whose error it was.
- Your own pension is not at risk. Accrued Armed Forces pension benefits are set by the scheme’s rules and backed by government. None of these administrative problems reduces what you have earned.
What the report is
Every year the Ministry of Defence has to publish audited accounts for the Armed Forces Pension Scheme, and lay them before Parliament. The 2025/26 edition (formally HC 388, covering the year to 31 March 2026) went up on GOV.UK on 15 July 2026. It runs to 79 pages of accountability report, financial statements and membership tables, and it is signed off by the Comptroller and Auditor General, the head of the National Audit Office, who audits it on Parliament’s behalf.
Most annual reports of this kind pass without notice. This one is worth a member’s attention, not because it contains a threat to your pension, but because it sets out, in the scheme’s own words and its auditor’s, several things that ordinary members can actually do something about. This is the plain-English tour. If you want the background on how the Armed Forces schemes work in the first place, our guide to AFPS 75, 05 and 15 is the place to start.
McCloud statements: both deadlines missed, no completion date
The McCloud remedy corrects the age discrimination in the 2015 public sector pension reforms, and every affected member is entitled to a Remediable Service Statement (RSS) setting out their two benefit options for the period from 2015 to 2022. For the Armed Forces, those statements are badly behind.
The report’s own figures: “As of 22 June 2026, a total of 98,554 RSSs have been sent across Active, Deferred and Pensioner members… There are 38,060 RSSs outstanding for issue.” Deferred members, people who have left the forces but not yet drawn their pension, are the worst served, with only 58 per cent of their statements sent, against 83 per cent for serving members.
The timetable has slipped twice. The original deadline was 1 April 2025. A revised deadline of 31 March 2026 was then set, and in December 2025 the Defence Business Services team announced that this too would be missed: “At this stage, we are unable to provide a specific completion date for all outstanding RSSs.” So if you were one of the 38,060 counted as waiting at that date, there is still no date you can hold anyone to. The scheme says it is providing “regular updates… on gov.uk and via the Quarterly Digest”, which is the channel to watch. We track the position across all the public sector schemes in our McCloud remedy tracker.
The records that had been missed
The uncomfortable heart of this report is a set of exercises that found member records the scheme had lost track of. None of this is presented as fraud or as money going astray. It is the opposite problem: pensions that should have been counted, and in some cases paid, that the scheme’s own data had missed.
The first exercise goes back to a data migration in 2006, when legacy records were moved onto the Compensation and Pensions System. A review that began in 2023/24 and concluded in March 2026 looked at 56,396 records left with an “undetermined” status from that move. Of those, 2,698 (4.8 per cent) turned out to carry “a liability not previously accounted for”, and the accounts recognise a £45 million adjustment as a result.
The second is starker. Prompted by the National Audit Office, Defence Business Services ran a full system scan for deferred records inside a technical parameter (the so-called “penny pension” filter) and “identified approximately 16,319 deferred records that were not included on the deferred membership lists”. By 31 May 2026 about 15,865 of them (97 per cent) had been reviewed and updated, and of those, 1,529 (9.6 per cent) carried a liability that had not been accounted for. That produced a further £50 million adjustment. Put plainly: roughly sixteen thousand people’s deferred pensions had been sitting outside the lists the scheme used to value itself.
Taken together, those two exercises added about £95 million of pension liability that had not previously been counted. A third, separate issue was found in pensions already in payment: a systematic error in how pension increases were applied at State Pension age where a National Insurance adjustment applies. Around 1,900 members were reviewed: 323 had been overpaid, £5.1 million in all, and a smaller number of underpaid cases were also corrected.
Here is the honest limit for a worried reader. The report does not publish a list you can check yourself against, and it does not promise to write to everyone whose record was corrected. These are back-office fixes, carried out by the administrators. If you want to know whether your own record was affected, the practical route is to ask, using the contact details below, or to request a pension forecast (see the next section). What the exercises tell you is broader and simpler: the scheme has recently found records it had missed, so it is worth making sure yours is one it can see.
The overpayments are now being recovered
The £5.1 million of overpaid pensions described above is not being written off. It is being reclaimed from the people who received it, and the demands have started arriving. The Telegraph reported on 25 July 2026 that more than 1,000 veterans have been asked to repay sums that built up over years through errors none of them made. The Ministry of Defence identified the problem in November 2024; the letters reached pensioners in 2026.
Two different counts are circulating here, and they are worth keeping apart. The audited report puts the National Insurance error at 323 overpaid cases worth £5.1 million in total. The wider figure of more than 1,000 veterans covers additional calculation errors beyond that one, which the Forces Pension Society lists as pension sharing on divorce, early departure payments and guaranteed minimum pension. So £5.1 million is the audited total for the National Insurance error specifically, not a total for every affected veteran.
The reason the money is being recovered from members rather than absorbed by the department is a Treasury rule: public bodies must recover payments made in excess of entitlement regardless of who caused the error. The Ministry of Defence’s position is that “where payments have been made in genuine error, we have a responsibility to recover taxpayer funds and will always seek to do so in a sensitive and proportionate way, including through tailored repayment plans and one-to-one financial and welfare support from veterans services”.
What that looks like in practice is a smaller monthly pension for years. Two cases named in the reporting: a former Royal Navy warrant officer told he owed £45,687 accumulated since 2021, with about £750 a month taken back over five years and his monthly pension down by more than £1,000; and a retired Royal Navy captain facing a £16,000 recovery at £414 a month. The Telegraph reports that some cases exceed £100,000, though the largest individually named case in the coverage is the £45,687 one.
The Forces Pension Society, which flagged the pattern in June 2026, disputes where the burden should fall. Its chief executive, Major General Neil Marshall, calls the episode a “failure of leadership, oversight, process and quality assurance”, and argues that “the requirement to refund the public purse should lie with Veterans UK and Equiniti”, the administrators whose calculations produced the error. Campaigners have asked the Treasury to write the overpayments off. At the time of writing it has not.
A member who receives one of these letters and believes the decision is wrong is not without a route. The Armed Forces schemes run an Internal Dispute Resolution Procedure (IDRP), and a recovery decision can be taken through it. Unlike most schemes, the AFPS version is a single-stage process with no appeal stage: one review, one decision, and Veterans UK aims to respond within 60 working days, though GOV.UK currently warns it is not meeting that target. If you disagree with the outcome, the next step is the Pensions Ombudsman, who can be approached at any point during or after the complaint but must be contacted within three years of the decision or of you becoming aware of it. Both are free to use. There is also a point worth knowing before any of that: the minister told Parliament in November 2025 that where repayment causes financial difficulty, “the debt may be partially written off, or an affordable repayment plan can be arranged”. We cover the detail in our separate guide to what to do if you have been told to repay.
The failure the auditor calls out
The most quietly damning passage comes from the auditor. The Comptroller and Auditor General left the accounts unqualified, meaning the numbers can be relied on, but added a pointed note: “I note that the Scheme has continued to fail to discharge its statutory obligations under the Pension Schemes Act 1993.”
The obligation in question has existed since April 2006. Occupational schemes must tell “early leavers”, people who leave with more than three months’ but less than two years’ pensionable service, that they can either take a refund of their own contributions or transfer the value of their pension elsewhere. The report accepts that the MOD has not been doing this. There is, in its words, “no fully systemised end-to-end process to identify and notify affected members”, and existing systems “do not automatically flag individuals with less than two years’ service on exit”.
The accounts set aside a provision for putting it right: £41.5 million recognised in 2024/25, plus a further £3.5 million in 2025/26, a £45 million estimate of what the refunds and transfers might cost. (This is a different figure from the £45 million data adjustment above; the two are unrelated and only happen to be the same size.) The MOD told the public in a December 2025 notice that affected early leavers would be contacted “once plans are finalised”. Eight months on, the auditor records that “the exercise to communicate with historic early leavers has not commenced”, and that the automated process to stop it happening to today’s leavers is not expected until the new Compendia Touch system arrives, scheduled for early 2027. The auditor’s verdict on the pace: “it is disappointing that remedial actions have not been implemented in a more timely manner.”
If you left the Armed Forces at any point since April 2006 after a short spell of service, between three months and two years, and you were never told what would happen to your pension contributions, this is the passage that concerns you. You may be owed a refund or a transfer, and you can ask about it now rather than waiting for a letter that, on the scheme’s own admission, has not started going out.
17,018 unclaimed pensions, and how to claim yours
This is the part of the report with the clearest action attached. Buried in the membership tables is the number of Armed Forces pensions that are due but have never been claimed. It has risen to 17,018, from 15,113 the year before. The Forces Pension Society, which campaigns on exactly this, uses that figure as its measure of how well the unclaimed-pensions problem is being tackled, and it is going the wrong way.
The reason these pensions go unclaimed is simple and catches a lot of people out: a preserved Armed Forces pension is not paid automatically. You have to claim it. Someone who served for a few years in their twenties, left, and got on with civilian life may have a preserved pension waiting that nobody will pay until they ask. Preserved pensions are normally payable from a set age (age 65 for AFPS 75 preserved members, and scheme-dependent for the later schemes; our AFPS 75 and AFPS 15 guides cover the differences).
If any of that might apply to you, or to someone you served with, the steps are:
- To claim a preserved pension: complete AFPS Form 8 (the claim for payment of preserved pension benefits), or call Veterans UK on 0800 085 3600 to ask how. The form and guidance are on the GOV.UK Armed Forces pensions pages linked below.
- To check what you might be owed first: you can request a forecast of a deferred Armed Forces pension using Form 14, now available as an online service on GOV.UK. Members are entitled to one free forecast in any twelve-month period.
- If you are the widow, widower or surviving partner of someone who served and would have qualified, you may be entitled to dependant’s benefits, claimed through the same route. It is worth asking.
None of this is a scheme doing anyone a favour. A preserved pension is money you earned by serving; claiming it is simply collecting what is yours.
What it all means for you
Step back from the detail and the picture is reassuring in one direction and awkward in another. Your accrued Armed Forces pension is safe. It is a defined benefit set by the scheme’s rules and underwritten by government, and the report’s £143.9 billion scheme liability is simply the calculated value of all those promises, not a debt in trouble or a sign the scheme cannot pay. Our explainer on how UK public sector pensions actually work covers why a big liability number is normal for an unfunded scheme. None of the administrative failures in this report reduces a single member’s entitlement.
The awkward direction is that the same report shows an administration struggling to keep up with its own membership data and its own legal duties. For members, that turns into three practical things worth doing: if you have an unclaimed preserved pension, claim it; if you are waiting for a McCloud statement, know that you are one of tens of thousands and that there is no promised date, so keep an eye on the GOV.UK updates; and if you were ever a short-service early leaver since 2006, you can ask whether you are owed a refund or transfer that you were never told about. The report is, unusually, a document that rewards a member for reading it.
Common questions
Is my Armed Forces pension safe after all these errors?
Yes. Your benefits are set by the scheme’s regulations and backed by government, and accrued pension rights are protected. The problems in the report are about administration and data, not about the security of the pension you have earned. The auditor signed the accounts off as reliable.
I have a preserved AFPS pension I have never claimed. What do I do?
Preserved Armed Forces pensions are not paid automatically. To claim one, complete AFPS Form 8 or call Veterans UK on 0800 085 3600. You can also request a free forecast first using the online Form 14 service. If you served and left with a preserved pension and have never been paid, it is worth checking now.
How do I know if I was one of the missing or corrected records?
The report does not publish a list to check against, and it does not promise to contact everyone whose record was corrected. The data fixes are carried out by the administrators. If you want to know your own position, the practical step is to ask Veterans UK directly, or request a pension forecast, which will show the record the scheme currently holds for you.
I have been told to repay part of my Armed Forces pension. Do I have to?
Not necessarily in full. The Treasury’s rules do start from a presumption that public bodies recover payments made in excess of entitlement, even where the mistake was the administrator’s rather than yours. But the same rules set out defences a recipient can raise, including hardship, and a defence minister told Parliament in November 2025 that “the debt may be partially written off, or an affordable repayment plan can be arranged”. If you think the decision or the amount is wrong, the scheme’s single-stage Internal Dispute Resolution Procedure is the formal route to challenge it, and the Pensions Ombudsman can look at the case afterwards. Both are free to use. Our separate guide to what to do if you have been told to repay goes through the defences and the process in detail.
I am still waiting for my McCloud remedy statement. When will it arrive?
There is still no confirmed date. As at 22 June 2026, 38,060 statements were outstanding across all cohorts and the scheme said it could not give a completion date. The most recent delivery update, published on 26 August 2026, gives the position as at 17 August: 99,077 statements issued and 11,770 immediate choice statements still to come, with the next update due in December 2026 and no completion date offered. Deferred members are the furthest behind. The scheme posts these updates on GOV.UK and in its Quarterly Digest, which are the best places to watch.
I left the forces after a short time, years ago. Could I be owed a refund?
Possibly. Since April 2006, the scheme has been legally required to tell people who left with between three months’ and two years’ service that they can take a refund of their contributions or a transfer. The auditor says the scheme has not been doing this and has not yet started contacting affected former members. If that describes you, you can ask Veterans UK about it rather than waiting.
The report shows a £143.9 billion liability. Is the scheme in trouble?
No. That figure is the calculated value today of all the pensions the scheme has promised to pay over the coming decades, not a bill due now. The Armed Forces scheme is unfunded, meaning pensions are paid from current government revenue as they fall due, and the promise is backed by government. A large liability number is a normal feature of a scheme this size.
Pension Plain’s take
Two things sit side by side in this report, and both are true. The first is that no member needs to worry about the safety of their pension: it is set by rules and backed by government, and the errors here are administrative, not existential. The second is that the scheme’s own auditor has, for a second year, put on record that it is failing a group of former members it has been legally obliged to contact since 2006, while the number of pensions nobody has claimed keeps climbing. The reassuring half and the uncomfortable half do not cancel out; they point at different people. If you or someone you served alongside has a preserved pension gathering dust, treat this report as the nudge to go and claim it. That is the rare annual report where reading it can put money in a member’s pocket.
Information, not advice. This article summarises a published government report as at 27 July 2026. It is general information, not financial advice, and Pension Plain is not authorised or regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Tax and pension rules depend on your circumstances and can change. For free and impartial guidance, contact MoneyHelper. For questions about your own Armed Forces pension, contact Veterans UK on 0800 085 3600 or through the GOV.UK pages below.
Key official sources
- Ministry of Defence, Armed Forces Pension Scheme: annual report and accounts 2025 to 2026 (HC 388, published 15 July 2026), the audited primary source for every figure above.
- GOV.UK, Armed forces pensions, the Veterans UK guidance hub, including contact details and the RSS delivery updates.
- GOV.UK, Armed Forces pension claim and forecast forms, including Form 8 (claim a preserved pension) and Form 14 (request a forecast).
- Forces Pension Society, Veterans’ Unclaimed Armed Forces Pensions Campaign, which tracks the unclaimed-benefits figure.
- Forces Pension Society, Pension overpayment errors: repayment responsibility should lie with Veterans UK and Equiniti, the Society’s position on who should bear the cost of the recovery.