LGPS for councillors and mayors: who qualifies from 11 May 2026

Update, 13 May 2026: SI 2026/346 commenced on 11 May 2026. Administering authorities including Avon Pension Fund, LPPA (Local Pensions Partnership Administration), and West Northants Pensions have published operational guidance confirming the opt-in process. Eligible councillors and mayors may now apply in writing to join the LGPS; members must apply separately for each eligible body, and town and parish councillors remain excluded. Contact details vary by area; check with the LGPS administering authority for your council.

Council elections in England fall on Thursday 7 May 2026, and the first Monday after, Monday 11 May, is the day a quiet but meaningful change in elected-member pension rules takes effect. From that date, councillors at English principal authorities, metro mayors, deputy mayors and London Assembly members can join the Local Government Pension Scheme. It’s the first time mayors as a category have ever been brought in. It’s also the first time most councillors will have had any formal pension access through their elected role since 2014, when the previous government scrapped the entitlement. The new arrangement isn’t identical to what existed before. Here’s who qualifies, what you actually get, and how to opt in.

Educational, not advice. This article explains the rules. It doesn’t tell you what to do. Pension decisions depend on your personal circumstances. For free, independent guidance, contact MoneyHelper. For regulated financial advice on what to do with a pension, speak to an FCA-authorised adviser.

What this article covers

• Does: Explain who can join, what the LGPS gives elected members, how the contribution structure works on allowances rather than salaries, and the practical mechanics of opting in.
• Doesn’t: Tell you whether you should opt in. That depends on how long you expect to serve, your wider financial position, and your other pension arrangements. Speak to a regulated adviser if it’s a close call.
• If you need advice: Speak to a regulated financial adviser, or contact MoneyHelper for free guidance.

Who qualifies

The entitlement applies to elected members in England in five specific categories.

• Councillors at principal authorities. County councils, unitary authorities, district councils, London boroughs, and the City of London Corporation.
• Combined authority mayors. The elected leaders of combined authorities such as Greater Manchester, the West Midlands, West Yorkshire, the North East, South Yorkshire, the Liverpool City Region, the East Midlands and the rest of the metro-mayor cohort.
• Deputy mayors of combined authorities.
• The Mayor of London.
• London Assembly members.

If you sit on a parish council or a town council, you don’t qualify. Co-opted committee members aren’t included either; the entitlement attaches to the elected role itself, not to participation in council business. Police and Crime Commissioners and their deputies are also out of scope. So are members of the National Park Authorities and other directly elected roles outside the principal-authority and combined-authority categories.

If you hold more than one elected role, each is assessed separately. A district councillor who is also elected to the same area’s combined authority cabinet, for example, would have two distinct LGPS records (one per allowance), each accruing on its own band.

A short history: why this change matters

Councillors in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland used to have access to the LGPS. The 2010 Hutton Review of public sector pensions led to the 2013 Public Service Pensions Act, and one of the smaller, less-discussed consequences was the closure of LGPS access to English councillors from 1 April 2014. Sitting councillors continued to accrue under transitional arrangements until they left office, but new councillors elected from that date onwards had no scheme access. Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish councillors kept theirs. The reasoning at the time was that elected service is not employment in the ordinary sense, and that ratepayers shouldn’t be funding pension accrual for politicians.

The argument cuts both ways. Without scheme access, principal-authority councillors in England were the only group of elected representatives in UK local government with no formal pension provision through their role. Combined authority mayors, when the structure rolled out from 2017 onwards, never had access at all. The 2025 reforms close both gaps.

The new arrangement isn’t a straight return to the pre-2014 design. It uses the current 2014 CARE scheme rules rather than reintroducing a separate councillor scheme. So if you had old councillor service in the LGPS from before 2014, that’s preserved as a deferred pension on the rules that applied at the time. Your new service from 11 May 2026 starts a fresh CARE record alongside it. The two periods don’t merge into a single salary-linked tranche.

What you actually get

The LGPS for elected members works on the same engine as the LGPS for council staff. It’s a defined-benefit, career-average scheme. The headline mechanics:

• Each year you serve, 1/49 of your pensionable allowance for that year is added to your pension account.
• Your account is revalued each April with CPI, so what you build now keeps its real value over time.
• At retirement you get a guaranteed annual pension for life, set by formula. There’s no investment pot to manage. No annuity to buy.
• You can ordinarily swap up to 25% of the capital value for a tax-free lump sum at £12 of cash for every £1 of annual pension surrendered, subject to the lump sum allowance (£268,275 for 2026/27).
• Death-in-service lump-sum cover and survivor pensions for spouses, civil partners and eligible cohabiting partners are part of the deal.

Pensionable allowance covers your basic allowance and any special-responsibility allowance for chairing a committee, leading a portfolio, holding a cabinet post, or being mayor of a district council. It doesn’t include expenses, travel, subsistence, or one-off non-allowance payments such as conference fees or election expenses. A councillor on £15,000 basic allowance with a £10,000 SRA has a pensionable allowance of £25,000. That’s the figure that goes into the 1/49 calculation.

Your administering authority is the LGPS fund that handles your record. For councillors at a county council, it’s typically the county fund. For unitary or London borough councillors, it’s the fund attached to that authority. Combined authority mayors enrol through the relevant administering authority for the combined authority area; this varies by region. Greater Manchester Pension Fund administers for the GMCA, for example, while London CIV-affiliated funds handle the London regions. Your monitoring officer or democratic services team can confirm which fund applies to you.

How to enrol

The decision sits with you. Contact your principal authority’s monitoring officer or democratic services team and ask to opt in. They’ll arrange the paperwork with the administering authority on your behalf. Member contributions come out of your allowance before income tax (the same way an employee’s LGPS contributions do), so most members get tax relief automatically through what’s called a net pay arrangement.

You can ordinarily opt in at any point during your term. There’s no fixed deadline within which you have to decide. Enrolling at the start gives you the longest period of accrual, which matters because pension build-up is cumulative and CPI-revalued; the earlier you start, the more time the revaluation has to compound.

One administrative point worth flagging. Your opt-in date determines the start of your contribution record, but the LGPS regulations also include a backdating provision that allows late-joining members to elect for accrual to start earlier in some circumstances. This is fund-by-fund and case-by-case. Your administering authority will tell you what’s available.

Contribution rates: how much you’ll pay

The LGPS contribution structure for 2026/27 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland uses nine pay bands ranging from 5.5% at the bottom to 12.5% at the top. Bands are uplifted each April in line with the previous September’s CPI; for 2026/27, that uplift was 3.8%. The rate is set on 1 April each year and reviewed only if your pensionable allowance changes materially mid-year.

For most councillors, the relevant bands are the lower end of the table. A typical councillor allowance of £15,000 to £25,000 sits in the 5.8% band. A senior councillor with a substantial SRA pushing total allowances to £30,000 to £45,000 lands in the 6.5% band. Combined authority mayors, with allowances closer to that of an MP (around £80,000 to £100,000 plus), are looking at 9.9% in the 2026/27 structure. The Mayor of London, with a higher allowance again, may be in the 10.5% or higher band.

The full 2026/27 contribution table is in the LGPS guide. Worth reading if you’re trying to model the cost.

Employer contributions are paid by the council on top of your member contribution. The rate is set fund-by-fund by the fund actuary at each triennial valuation. The current average across England and Wales is around 21% of pensionable pay, although the 2025 valuation has reduced rates substantially across most funds for 2026 to 2029. Your council bears that cost; it doesn’t come out of your allowance.

Three things worth knowing before you decide

1. A single four-year term won’t buy you much pension. Elected service is, for most members, a side-of-desk role rather than a full-time career, and four years of CARE accrual on a typical allowance produces a small deferred pension. That’s not a reason not to join; a small pension is better than no pension. But it’s worth being honest about the maths. Real value builds with sustained service across multiple terms.

2. The contribution rate is set by your allowance, not your wider income. A councillor on £25,000 in allowances pays the LGPS rate appropriate to a £25,000 salary, not the rate that would apply to their day-job earnings. If you have a separate professional career outside your council role, your allowance-band rate can look strikingly different from the rate you’d assume given your overall income. That’s a feature of the scheme, not a bug.

3. If you also work for the council as a paid officer, those are two separate LGPS records. Council-officer membership and elected-member membership coexist. They don’t merge into a single combined-pay calculation. You’d see two contribution lines on your payroll and two pension records at retirement, each accruing at its own band rate on its own pensionable income. Funds are used to administering this; it’s the same way the scheme handles members with multiple separate jobs in the council family.

Worked examples

What you don’t get

Worth being clear on the limits of the new entitlement:

• No automatic enrolment. The auto-enrolment regime that applies to employees doesn’t apply to elected members. You opt in deliberately.
• No employer top-up beyond the LGPS. Some councils offer additional defined-contribution arrangements for senior officers; nothing equivalent applies to elected members.
• No 50/50 section access for elected members at the time of writing. The 50/50 section is a feature of LGPS membership for employees and may not be available to councillor and mayor members. Confirm with your administering authority before assuming you can use it.
• No automatic life cover before opt-in. The death-in-service lump-sum cover starts when your membership starts, not when you take office. If you’re still considering whether to opt in and something happens to you in the meantime, your family receives nothing under the LGPS.
• No mid-cycle change of fund. If you move to a different authority during your term (a by-election in another area, for example), you join the new authority’s fund. You don’t get to choose.

A short pre-opt-in checklist

• Confirm with your monitoring officer that your role is in scope (most are; some hybrid roles aren’t).
• Identify which administering authority will hold your record.
• Check what your contribution rate will be (it follows from your allowance band).
• Decide whether to nominate someone for the death-in-service lump sum. The Death Grant Expression of Wish form is what your fund will look at if the worst happens. Keep it up to date.
• If you have old LGPS service from a previous council role or earlier councillor service, check whether transferring or aggregating helps. Get the figures from your fund first; some transfers are better left alone.

Common questions

Pension Plain’s take

For most councillors, the question isn’t whether the LGPS is a good scheme; it plainly is, by any reasonable measure. The question is whether elected service is for you a sustained role across multiple terms or a one-cycle commitment. If it’s the latter, you’ll leave the scheme with a small deferred pension, useful but not transformative. If it’s the former, the maths starts to compound and the cumulative figure becomes substantial. Both are legitimate; just don’t model a single-term opt-in as if it’s a career pension.

For metro mayors and senior councillors with substantial allowances, the figures are larger and the calculus is genuinely worth taking seriously. The combined authority mayoralties are still relatively new and tenure is uncertain; even so, an eight-year run produces a meaningful pension on top of whatever you’ve built up elsewhere. Worth modelling against your existing arrangements before you opt in. If you’ve already got a strong DC pot or another DB scheme on the side, the LGPS contribution simply adds to a portfolio. If you’re starting from less, it’s the bedrock.

The political question (whether public money should fund elected-member pensions at all) is settled for now. England has joined Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland on this. Future governments may revisit it; for the time being, the entitlement is open and worth using if it suits your circumstances.

Key official sources

• Mayors and councillors to access LGPS under reforms (GOV.UK, October 2025) — the official announcement.
• lgpsmember.org/contact-your-fund — directory of all LGPS administering authorities in England and Wales.
• MoneyHelper, pensions and retirement — free, government-backed pension guidance.
• The Pensions Ombudsman — for unresolved complaints about pension administration.
• Pension Plain: LGPS guide: how the Local Government Pension Scheme works — full mechanics for the underlying scheme.

Fact-checked 6 May 2026.