Retiring early from a public service pension: what each scheme actually publishes

Educational, not advice. This article explains what the public service pension schemes publish about early retirement and how those figures differ. Pension Plain is not authorised or regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Nothing here is a recommendation about when to retire or whether to take benefits early. Only your own scheme can give you your figures.

Scope: This is a cross-scheme comparison covering the NHS, Teachers’, Civil Service, Armed Forces, Police, Firefighters’ and Local Government schemes. It gives one headline per scheme and links to our full guide for each; it deliberately does not re-explain any single scheme’s mechanics. It covers voluntary early retirement, not ill health retirement, which has its own rules and its own guide.

“What does it cost me to go early?” is one of the most common questions in public service pensions, and one of the least well answered.

We set out to build a table: seven schemes, one row each, what you lose per year early. It can’t be done honestly. The reasons why turn out to be more useful than the table would have been.

The schemes are not speaking the same language

Here is the same question, answered by different schemes, in different units:

• The Armed Forces scheme gives a total at an age: around 35% if a deferred AFPS 15 pension is claimed at 60 against a State Pension age of 68, and around 48% at 55.
• The Police 2015 scheme gives a total for a span: an actuarial reduction of around 20% for taking it five years early.
• A Teachers’ union quotes a rate per year: about 3.8% to 5.2% for each year taken early.
• The LGPS publishes a full factor table by years early, with separate pension and lump sum columns.
• The Police 1987 scheme has no normal pension age at all. An unreduced pension comes from 30 years’ service at any age, or 25 years’ service at 50 or over. There is nothing to be early against.
• The NHS 2015 scheme measures against your State Pension age, which is personal to your date of birth, so the same “five years early” means a different reduction for different members.

A total at an age, a total for a span, a rate per year, a full table, a service test, and a personalised target. Six units for one question.

You can’t average those. Converting between them needs the underlying factor table, which is exactly the thing most schemes don’t publish in a usable form.

Your lump sum is reduced differently from your pension

This is the single most useful thing on this page, and almost no guidance says it.

Where a scheme pays both a pension and an automatic lump sum, the two are reduced using separate factors. A worked example published by the BMA for the NHS 1995 Section makes the point: retiring one year early at 59 applies a pension factor of 0.957 and a lump sum factor of 0.983. The pension drops about 4.3%, the lump sum about 1.7%.

The same asymmetry runs the other way in the LGPS. When the LGPS updated its early retirement factors on 1 August 2026, the lump sum reduction rose by proportionally much more than the pension reduction: at five years early it went from 8.1% to 9.4%, while the pension reduction moved only from 20.9% to 21.5%.

So any single “you lose X% a year” figure is really two different numbers flattened into one. If your decision turns on the lump sum, the headline percentage isn’t the one you need.

The 2028 age rise, and who escapes it

The normal minimum pension age, the earliest most people can take any pension, rises from 55 to 57 on 6 April 2028.

It doesn’t apply to everyone. The uniformed services are exempt. Members of the Armed Forces, Police and Firefighters’ schemes keep a minimum pension age of 55.

Members of the NHS, Teachers’, Civil Service and Local Government schemes are not exempt and will see the minimum move to 57.

For anyone in those four schemes currently planning around age 55 or 56, that is a hard date worth putting in the calendar now, because it changes the earliest possible option rather than just its price.

Most schemes haven’t published their new factors

The SCAPE discount rate changed in 2026, and that feeds directly into actuarial factors, including early retirement reductions, across the public service schemes.

Here’s the state of play, and it’s patchier than you’d expect:

• LGPS: published and in force. The relevant batch of factors was published on 13 July 2026 and applies to retirements from 1 August 2026. Our full breakdown of the new LGPS factors has the before and after tables.
• Police 1987 and Firefighters 1992 commutation: confirmed in effect. Members who commute pension into a lump sum can expect the value of that lump sum to be reduced by around 5% as a result of the change. Note this is a commutation factor, not an early retirement reduction; it is a different sum.
• Police 2015: published, effective 1 August 2026. The Police Federation now sets out the new reduction factors in two tables, one measured from normal pension age and one from state pension age, and states that the factors changed on 1 August 2026. Note what has not been settled: the factors for buying out the reduction are described as still under review, which is a different figure from the reduction itself.
• Firefighters: commutation factors prioritised, no confirmed date.
• NHS, Teachers’, Civil Service and Armed Forces: still nothing published. No published, dated update to early retirement factors could be found for any of the four. The NHS is the only one giving a date, and its own guidance says early retirement and redundancy factors are expected in September 2026.

That last line is a statement about what is published, not a prediction. It doesn’t mean those schemes won’t change their factors. It means that as things stand, a member of four of the seven schemes cannot look up what their reduction will be after a change that has already happened elsewhere.

What each scheme publishes, and where to read it

One line each, with the full detail in our scheme guides rather than repeated here.

On the NHS specifically, since it’s the largest scheme: no current member-facing percentage table could be obtained from the scheme. Figures circulating on calculator and comparison sites are not published scheme figures and are not repeated here. Your annual benefit statement and the scheme’s own estimate service are the only reliable route to your number.

Four ways to reduce the reduction

Several schemes let you soften or remove the reduction, and no two of them go about it the same way.

• LGPS: Additional Pension Contributions can buy out some or all of an early retirement reduction.
• Firefighters’: the Early Retirement Reduction Buy Out, ERRBO, lets members pay extra in advance to buy out part or all of the reduction.
• Civil Service: Effective Pension Age lets a member pay to bring their pension age forward by up to three years, and not below 65. Take-up is reportedly under 5%.
• Teachers’: faster accrual builds pension at a higher rate rather than addressing the reduction directly.

One that is often misread: the Armed Forces Early Departure Payment is not a buy-out. It is a separate bridging payment for those leaving with at least 20 years’ service and aged at least 40, paying part of the eventual pension until normal pension age. It does not reduce the actuarial reduction that applies later.

All four buy-out routes share one feature worth understanding before anyone gets attached to them: you pay for them in advance, over years, and they only pay off if you actually retire when you said you would.

FAQ

Pension Plain’s take

We expected to publish a comparison table and found we couldn’t build one that was true. That is worth saying plainly, because the internet is full of tables that do exactly this, and they are made by converting between bases the schemes themselves do not convert between.

The more uncomfortable finding is the second one. A discount rate change has already worked through into the LGPS and the Police 2015 scheme, and members of four of the seven schemes still cannot look up what it means for them. The gap is not a few days. The same change reached police officers on 1 August and, on the NHS scheme’s own published expectation, will not reach its members until September at the earliest. Members of the Teachers’, Civil Service and Armed Forces schemes have no date at all.

If you’re weighing this decision, the practical upshot is that a published percentage from anywhere other than your own scheme is a starting point at best. The number that matters is the one on your own estimate, and for four of these schemes that estimate is currently the only place the number exists.

Information, not advice. This article describes what the public service pension schemes published about early retirement as at 31 July 2026. Actuarial factors are revised periodically and several schemes had not published updates at the time of writing. It is general information and not a personal recommendation. Pension Plain is not authorised or regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Your own figures depend on your service, your section of the scheme and your dates, so your scheme administrator is the authority on your case, and MoneyHelper offers free impartial guidance.

Key official sources

• LGPS member site, Early retirement reductions, the most transparent published factor table of the seven schemes.
• House of Commons Library, SCAPE discount rate change (CBP-10967), for the cross-scheme effect including the 1987 Police and 1992 Firefighters commutation impact.
• Police Federation of England and Wales, 2015 CARE scheme, which carries the new reduction factor tables and states that they changed on 1 August 2026. The earlier GAD actuarial factor review update is the record of the position before that.
• British Medical Association, Taking early retirement, for the NHS 1995 Section worked example showing separate pension and lump sum factors.
• gov.uk, Police Pension Scheme 2015 administrators’ guide.

Fact-checked: 22 August 2026