How to use HMRC’s ‘Calculate your public service pension adjustment’ service

If the McCloud remedy has changed how much pension you built up between 2015 and 2022, it can also change the tax you should have paid in those years. The catch is that you do not fix that through your normal tax return. HMRC built a separate online service for it, called “Calculate your public service pension adjustment”, and for the years affected by the remedy it is the route you are expected to use.

It is not the most welcoming piece of government software, and people understandably stall at the “before you start” stage. This walks through what the service is for, what you need to have in front of you, what it asks you to do, what it can produce (including a refund, in many cases), and the deadlines. Our explainer on McCloud and tax covers the concepts behind it; this is the practical how-to. It describes how the service works, not what tax or pension decision is right for you.

What the service is for

The remedy rolls eligible members back into their legacy scheme for the period 1 April 2015 to 31 March 2022, then lets them choose which benefits they want for those years. Changing the pension you are treated as having built up also changes your pension input amounts, the figures used to test you against the annual allowance. So the tax you paid, or should have paid, on pension growth in those years can shift, up or down.

The “Calculate your public service pension adjustment” service is where you reconcile that. It works out whether you are owed a refund of an annual allowance or lifetime allowance charge you previously paid, or whether a new or larger charge is due, and it submits that information to HMRC. One thing it deliberately does not do is calculate your pension benefits or make your McCloud choice. Those are handled with your pension scheme; this service is only about the tax.

Before you start: what you need

Most of the difficulty with this service is gathering the inputs. It is worth assembling these before you log in rather than hunting for them halfway through.

• Your Remediable Pension Savings Statement (RPSS), sometimes called a Remedy Pension Savings Statement, including any revised versions. This is the key document, and our guide on how to read your remedy statement sits alongside it.
• Your income figures for each tax year from 2015/16 to 2022/23: total taxable income, adjusted income and threshold income, plus your personal allowance. These come from your P60s or your personal tax account.
• Any Self Assessment returns you filed for those years, including any annual allowance or lifetime allowance charges you already reported.
• Any retirement or benefit crystallisation statements, if you have taken benefits.
• Your pension scheme membership details for any scheme you were in between 6 April 2015 and 5 April 2023.
• A Government Gateway user ID and password. Signing in lets you save your answers and submit once, rather than entering everything in a single sitting.

HMRC publishes detailed guidance listing every question the service will ask. Reading that first, with your RPSS next to it, is the single thing that makes the process go smoothly.

What the service asks you to do

The service does not publish a fixed numbered path, but in practice it runs in four stages:

• Watch the short explanatory video (optional, but it orients you).
• Enter your details and pension figures for the remedy years, working from your RPSS and income records.
• Receive your calculation results, which show whether anything changes and by how much.
• Submit, or contact HMRC, if there is a change to settle. If there is nothing to change, there may be nothing further to do.

You do not have to finish in one go. The service lets you save your progress and come back, within a 9-month window, which is useful given how many figures it asks for.

What comes out the other end

The result depends on your figures and, importantly, on which remedy years are involved. HMRC treats the earlier and later years differently.

The headline most people want to hear is that the remedy frequently reduces a charge rather than adds one, particularly where rolling back to the legacy scheme lowers your pension input for a year. But it genuinely can go either way, which is the whole reason the service exists: to work out your actual position rather than assume it.

Deadlines, and why yours may differ

There is a deadline, and it is tied to when your statement was issued rather than a single fixed date for everyone. HMRC’s original deadline was 31 January 2025. For a Remediable Pension Savings Statement issued to you after 1 November 2024, the rule is that you have three months from the date you receive it. Because statements are still being sent out well into 2026, as our McCloud remedy tracker sets out, the three-months-from-receipt deadline is the one most members are working to now.

The practical takeaway: do not work to a date you half-remember. Check the covering letter that came with your RPSS for the deadline that applies to you, and if you are unsure, contact HMRC before the three months are up. Deadlines in this area have been extended more than once as the statements have been delayed, so the current wording on the gov.uk page is the thing to trust over any older summary, including this one.

Do not use your tax return for these years

This trips people up, so it is worth stating plainly. For new or changed charges arising from the remedy for the years 2015/16 to 2022/23, HMRC’s guidance is that you use this service, not Self Assessment. Putting a remedy-related annual allowance figure on your ordinary tax return for those years is not the right route and can cause confusion. If you normally file a tax return, you still do, but the remedy adjustment for those years goes through the public service pension adjustment service.

Where to get help

If your figures are complex, for example you have benefits in more than one scheme, or you had charges in several of the remedy years, this is a reasonable point to get help rather than guess. HMRC has a helpline for the remedy, your pension scheme can explain the figures on your RPSS, and a tax adviser or accountant can complete the service with you for genuinely complicated cases. For free and impartial guidance on your pension more broadly, MoneyHelper is the government-backed service, and for regulated advice on a pension decision you would speak to a financial adviser authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority.

Common questions

Pension Plain’s take

The service has a reputation for being intimidating, and some of that is fair: it asks for a lot of figures and assumes you know where to find them. But the difficulty is almost entirely in the preparation, not the submission. Gather your Remediable Pension Savings Statement and your income records for the remedy years first, read HMRC’s list of questions alongside them, and the service itself becomes a data-entry job rather than a guessing game. The part worth holding on to is that this often ends in a refund, not a bill, and that the deadline is personal to your statement. The thing not to do is ignore the brown envelope because the form looks daunting.

Fact-checked: 17 June 2026