LGPS Break in Membership: Five-Year Rule and Final Salary

What this page covers

Does: Explain how the scheme works in plain English, with current rates, terms and rules.
Doesn’t: Tell you what to choose. Pension decisions depend on your circumstances and need a regulated adviser.
If you need advice: Speak to a regulated financial adviser, or contact MoneyHelper for free guidance.

Leave the LGPS, do something else for a while, then come back, and one number quietly decides what a large part of your pension is worth. That number is five years. Stay under it and the most valuable thing you own in the scheme survives intact. Go over it and, depending on a choice most members never realise they are making, it can end.

The scheme calls a break in membership of more than five years a disqualifying gap. Ugly phrase, simple idea, and it matters far more than its profile suggests. This is what the rule means, what it counts, what it costs, and the decision you get when you rejoin.

In short

A disqualifying gap is more than five years when you were not paying into the LGPS or any other public service pension scheme.
It counts every public service scheme, not just the LGPS. Six years in the NHS or teaching is not a gap at all.
Five years or less, and your pre-2014 membership stays final salary membership, linked to your pay when you eventually leave.
More than five years, and if you combine, that pre-2014 pension is converted into a fixed amount of career average pension.
Converted pension takes your State Pension age (floor 65), not the protected 65 that applied before.
Combining happens automatically. Keeping the two separate is a choice you have to make, normally within twelve months.

When an LGPS break in membership becomes a disqualifying gap

The scheme’s own definition is one sentence: a period of more than five years when you were not paying into the LGPS or any other public service pension scheme.

Two things follow from that sentence, and both catch people out.

The first is that the test is about one continuous stretch, not a running total. Three separate two-year breaks over a working life are not a disqualifying gap, however untidy the record looks. One unbroken stretch of five years and a month is. If you have moved in and out of local government several times, ask of each gap how long that one gap ran, not what they add up to.

The second is the one that most often gets stated wrongly, including in guidance that ought to know better. The five years counts membership of any public service pension scheme, not just the LGPS.

The schemes that count

Leave a council for a job in an NHS trust, spend six years there paying into the NHS Pension Scheme, then come back to local government, and you have not had a disqualifying gap. You were in a public service pension scheme throughout. The clock never started.

The schemes that count for this include the LGPS itself, the NHS Pension Scheme, the Teachers’ Pension Scheme, the Civil Service pension arrangements, the Armed Forces Pension Scheme, the Police pension schemes and the Firefighters’ Pension Scheme. What does not count is a private sector pension, a personal pension, or no pension at all. Ten years in a company scheme is a ten-year gap for this purpose, however diligently you were saving.

This is worth knowing because so many public sector careers zig-zag across schemes. A teaching assistant who trains as a nurse, a council officer who does a stint in the civil service, a firefighter who moves into a local authority role: none of them has a gap, and all of them would be told otherwise by a quick reading of most LGPS guidance.

What a long break costs: the final salary link

To see why five years matters so much, you need one fact about the pre-2014 scheme. Membership built up before 1 April 2014 is not frozen at 2014. It is worked out using your pay when you eventually leave the scheme, which for someone still working might be fifteen or twenty years and several promotions later. That is the final salary link, and over a long career with rising pay it can be worth a very large sum.

The link is what a disqualifying gap puts at risk. Not your pension itself, which you keep either way, but the mechanism that lets the oldest and often most generous slice of it grow with your salary rather than with inflation.

The choice nobody mentions

Here is the part that surprises people. When you rejoin the LGPS holding a deferred pension from before, the default is that the two are joined together automatically. You do not have to do anything for that to happen. What you can do, normally within twelve months of rejoining and longer if your employer allows it, is elect to keep them separate.

If your break was five years or less, combining is straightforward: the pre-2014 part carries on as final salary membership attached to your new pension account, and the link holds, along with the protected normal pension age of 65 that goes with it. If your break was more than five years, the two routes diverge sharply.

After a break of more than five years	What happens to your pre-2014 pension
You combine (the default)	Its value buys a fixed amount of career average pension in your new account. The final salary link ends. The converted pension is payable at your State Pension age, with a floor of 65.
You elect to keep it separate	It stays a deferred final salary pension, based on your pay at the date you left that earlier job, increased each year in line with prices. It keeps its own normal pension age.

The two routes after a disqualifying gap, England and Wales. Which produces more depends entirely on the figures, which only your fund can supply. Source: LGPS funds.

Notice that neither route preserves the link to your future pay. That is the real cost of the gap. What the choice decides is whether the old pension is converted into career average pension now, or left where it is as a deferred final salary pension pegged to an older salary. Those are different bets on different things, and there is no rule of thumb that settles which is better. A member whose pay has risen sharply since the earlier job, and a member who left a well-paid role for a lower-paid one, are in genuinely opposite positions.

The normal pension age point is easy to skate past and can matter as much as the money. Pre-2014 membership carries a protected normal pension age, which for almost all members is 65. Convert it and it picks up the normal pension age of the career average account instead, which tracks your State Pension age. For anyone whose State Pension age is 67 or 68, that is a real change to when the pension can be drawn without a reduction.

The McCloud consequence

A disqualifying gap does one more thing, and it is separate from everything above. It removes you from McCloud underpin protection.

The underpin protects members who were in a public service scheme before the 2014 reforms, by checking their career average pension over the remedy period against what final salary would have given them and paying the better of the two. There are four conditions. You need to have been a member of the LGPS or another public service pension scheme before 1 April 2012; a member of the LGPS at some point in the remedy period between 1 April 2014 and 31 March 2022; under 65 in that period; and to have had no disqualifying gap.

The fourth condition is doing real work. A member who satisfies the first three comfortably, with decades of service, can still fall out of the underpin entirely on the strength of one long break. It is also why the underpin generally requires the relevant membership to sit together rather than in separate pots: where there has been a break, the benefits usually need to be aggregated for the protection to apply at all. If you have both a break and a possible underpin, that interaction is the first thing to ask your fund about, because it can pull the decision in a different direction from the pure final-salary arithmetic.

What the five-year rule is not

The five-year rule gets muddled with two other numbers that live nearby.

It is not the two-year vesting period. Two years of qualifying membership is what you need before you are entitled to a pension at all rather than a refund of contributions. That is a threshold at the start. The five-year rule is about what happens to a pension you already have.
It is not the twelve-month transfer window. You get twelve months from joining the LGPS to elect to transfer in pension rights from elsewhere, unless your employer and fund allow longer. That window is about moving pension in from another scheme. The five-year rule is about the character of LGPS pension you already hold.

How to find out where you stand

Everything here turns on dates that your fund holds and you probably do not: the exact day you left, the exact day you rejoined, and whether anything in between was pensionable in a public service scheme. If you think a gap of anywhere near five years is in your record, that is the conversation to have, and it is worth having before the twelve months to elect runs out rather than after.

Ask your fund for the figures both ways: what the earlier benefits are worth combined, and what they are worth kept separate. Any fund will produce that. Ask as well whether the underpin is in play, because that can change the shape of the answer. For free and impartial guidance on what to do with the numbers once you have them, MoneyHelper is the government-backed service, and for regulated advice on the decision itself you would speak to an adviser authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority.

Common questions

Does a career break or unpaid leave count as a break in membership?

It depends on whether you remained a member of the scheme during it, which depends on the type of leave and what was agreed with your employer. The test is about membership of a public service pension scheme, not about whether you were at work. Your fund and your employer between them hold the record of what your status was, and that is the only reliable answer.

I had two separate three-year breaks. Is that a disqualifying gap?

No. The test is a single continuous break of more than five years, not a total. Two three-year breaks with membership in between are two breaks of three years, and neither one exceeds five.

I spent six years in the NHS. Have I lost my final salary link?

No. The NHS Pension Scheme is a public service pension scheme, so you were a member of one throughout and there is no disqualifying gap. The same goes for teaching, the civil service, the police, the fire service and the armed forces. It is only time outside all of them that counts.

If I do nothing when I rejoin, what happens?

In most cases your deferred benefits are joined to your new pension account automatically. Keeping them separate is the option that requires you to act, normally within twelve months of rejoining unless your employer allows longer. So doing nothing is itself a decision, and after a break of more than five years it is the decision that converts your old final salary pension into career average pension.

Is keeping them separate better?

There is no general answer, and anyone who gives you one without seeing your figures is guessing. It turns on how your pay has moved since the earlier job, your dates, your normal pension ages under each route and whether the McCloud underpin is in play. Your fund will quote both. That quote, not a rule of thumb, is what the decision should rest on.

Does a break affect my 85-year rule protection?

This is a question for your fund rather than one to reason out from the general rules. The 85-year rule protections attach to membership built up before 1 October 2006, and where a break causes that membership to be converted, how the protection travels with it is exactly the kind of detail that turns on your individual record. Ask, and ask specifically, rather than assuming either way.

Does this apply in Scotland and Northern Ireland?

This article describes England and Wales. The LGPS in Scotland and the Northern Ireland scheme run by NILGOSC are separate schemes with their own regulations and their own dates. The five-year concept exists across the public service schemes, but check the detail with your own scheme rather than assuming it reads across.

Pension Plain’s take

Two things about this rule deserve more attention than they get. The first is that the most consequential version of the decision is the one made by not making it: combining is automatic, and for a member returning after a long break that default quietly converts the best part of their pension. A rule where inaction has the larger effect is a rule that should be flagged loudly at the moment of rejoining, and it generally is not.

The second is the cross-scheme point. The five-year test was written to recognise that a public service career is not the same as a career at one employer, and it does that job well. But it is routinely described as an LGPS-only test, which turns a protection into an apparent penalty for exactly the people it was meant to cover. If you left local government for the NHS and came back, you have almost certainly been told the wrong thing at some point. You did not lose anything.

Related guides

This article is general information about the Local Government Pension Scheme for members in England and Wales. It isn’t financial advice, and your own position depends on your exact membership dates, which schemes you were in during any break, your pay history and your fund. The rules are correct as of August 2026. For your personal figures, and for a quote of what your benefits are worth combined and kept separate, contact your LGPS fund. For regulated financial advice on which route to take, speak to a financial adviser authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority. Pension Plain is not authorised or regulated by the FCA.

Key official sources used

Fact-checked 17 August 2026

Breaks in your LGPS membership: the five year rule that decides your final salary link