Teachers’ Pension death benefits: how to claim now the online route has gone

If a teacher in your family has died, you are not reading this for background. Either a form has arrived and it runs to six pages, or you have been told to send one and cannot work out which. And as of last week the route most people would have reached for first, claiming Teachers’ Pension death benefits online, is no longer there.

On 17 August 2026 Teachers’ Pensions withdrew its online death benefits application service. Its own wording is short and leaves no room for a workaround: “Our online death benefits application service is being removed from 17 August 2026. It won’t be possible to let us know about a death or apply for benefits online.” Claimants are directed to a paper form instead. No replacement online service was announced alongside it.

This guide is the practical account: which form you now need, where it goes, what it asks for, what the scheme actually pays, the four things that quietly stall a claim, and the one deadline that carries a real financial penalty. We have written the same guide for the Civil Service scheme, and one difference between the two schemes is worth knowing about before you start.

What actually changed on 17 August

Two online things at Teachers’ Pensions are easy to confuse, and only one of them has gone.

My Pension Online is the member’s own account. A serving or retired teacher uses it to say who should receive their death grant. That still works, and nothing in the announcement touches it. If you are a member reading this to get your own affairs in order, your nomination route is unchanged.

The online death benefits application was the separate route a bereaved relative used to report a death and claim. That is what was withdrawn. From 17 August 2026 there is no online way to tell Teachers’ Pensions that someone has died, and no online way to claim.

The timing invites a question, so it is worth answering directly. Teachers’ Pensions confirmed on 6 August 2026 that scheme administration transfers from Capita to Tata Consultancy Services on 1 November 2026. The online claim route was withdrawn eleven days after that announcement. No official source connects the two. The 17 August notice does not mention the handover, and none of the handover announcements mentions the death service. The sequence is real; the connection is not something anybody has stated, and we are not going to imply one.

The form you now need

There is one form for the family, and it does both jobs at once. It tells the scheme about the death and it claims the benefits. You do not need to send anything separate to notify.

Part	Who fills it in	When
Part A, about the deceased member	You, or whoever is dealing with the estate	Always. “Parts A and B of this form must be completed in all cases, regardless of whether any benefits are being claimed.”
Part B, about you and where money goes	You	Always, as above
Part C, child beneficiary details	You	Only if claiming a child’s pension
Form 22A, service and salary information	The employer, not you	Where the teacher died in service

That last row is the one people do not expect. Form 22A is an employer document. A school or trust that has never had to complete one may sit on it, and until it arrives the death grant cannot be paid. If your claim has gone quiet and everything you were asked for went in weeks ago, the employer form is the first thing to ask about by name.

Two Darlington addresses, and only one of them is yours

Teachers’ Pensions uses different return addresses for different forms, and they are both in Darlington, which is exactly the sort of detail that sends a pack to the wrong postroom.

• Death notification and application for death benefits goes to Teachers’ Pensions, PO Box 402, Darlington, DL1 9UX. This is the one a bereaved family sends.
• Nomination for death grant goes to Teachers’ Pensions, 11b Lingfield Point, Darlington, DL1 1AX. This is a form a living member fills in, and it is not part of a claim.

No email submission route is published for the claim form. Post is the only confirmed channel.

What the form asks for

Part A wants the member’s Teachers’ Pensions reference, National Insurance number, date of birth and date of death, their marital or partnership status, and, if they died in service or within twelve months of leaving, their last employer.

Part B wants your own details, the surviving spouse or partner’s details, and UK bank sort code and account number. If payment is going overseas the form takes an IBAN and BIC, and notes that “payments made to overseas bank accounts will only be paid in the banks local currency”. There is space for a solicitor’s details, including whether they are applying for probate and whether the lump sum should be paid direct to them.

Section B3 is a tick list of documents. Not all of them apply to every claim. The ones that come up most are:

• “Death certificate (signed certified copy or original)”
• “Marriage certificate (signed certified copy or original)” or “Civil registration certificate”
• “Children’s birth certificates (showing full details of parents)”
• “Grant of probate (with accompanying letter signed by all parties named on the Probate)”
• “Proof of financial interdependency”, which the form notes is “Not required where there is a Marriage or Civil Partnership Certificate”
• “Certificate of continuing education”, for a child over 17
• “Certified Power of Attorney or Court of Protection order (Full document)”

On copies, Teachers’ Pensions is more forgiving than some schemes. Where the member lived in the UK, “a copy of the document is acceptable where it has been signed and witnessed by a ‘person of good standing’”. Where the member lived outside the UK, the original is required and will be returned.

What the scheme pays

Three separate things can be payable, and they are calculated differently: a one-off death grant, a short-term pension for the first few months, and an ongoing long-term pension. Most members now have service in both the final salary and the career average sections, and where that is the case Teachers’ Pensions says “a calculation will be made in respect of each scheme and we’ll pay both as one combined pension”.

The death grant

When the member died	What is paid
In service	“a death grant of three times your final full-time equivalent salary (at your date of death) will be paid”
After leaving, before retiring (career average)	Accrued pension multiplied by 2.25, where a surviving adult pension is payable. Otherwise the higher of that or contributions plus 3% interest
After leaving, before retiring (final salary)	“3/80ths of your final average salary multiplied by your service”, where a surviving adult pension is payable. Otherwise the higher of that or contributions plus 3% interest
After leaving, without qualifying for benefits	“your pension contributions plus interest at 3%”
After reaching Normal Pension Age but before claiming	“a posthumous award of five times your annual pension rather than an out of service death grant”
Within five years of retiring	“five times your annual pension less any pension received prior to your death”, the supplementary death grant, “the same for all pensioners regardless of which scheme”

One caveat on the first row. Teachers’ Pensions publishes that three times figure in its career average material, and does not publish a separate in-service multiple for a member whose service is entirely in the final salary sections. If the teacher left teaching before April 2015 and never returned, that is a question for the contact centre, not one to guess at, and we would rather say so than print a number we cannot source.

Who receives it: “A death grant is payable to the person nominated to receive it by the member. If there is no nominee, it will be paid to the member’s spouse, civil partner, nominated partner or, if there is no such person, it will be paid to the member’s personal representative on production of Letters of Administration.” A nomination cannot be made to a trust or a charity, and, importantly, marrying does not cancel an earlier nomination. As Teachers’ Pensions puts it, “It’s up to you to remember to keep your nomination up to date.” Nominations made before April 2005 may not appear on the current system but remain valid.

The short-term pension

For the first three months, a surviving adult receives the equivalent of the member’s full salary if they died in service, or their full pension if they were retired. It is backdated to the date of death. Dependent children receive the same amount again over the same three months. Where there is no surviving adult, the children’s payment runs for six months instead. Short-term pensions paid to adults are taxed through PAYE.

Teachers’ Pensions has paid this itself since 1 February 2016. Before that it came from the employer, which is worth knowing if you are reading older guidance that tells you to contact the school.

The long-term survivor’s pension

Section	Long-term adult survivor’s pension
Final salary	“1/160 of the final average salary for each year of your survivor benefits service plus a service enhancement which is dependent on the amount of service you have accrued and your age when you die”
Career average	“37.5% of the pension you’ve earned up to your date of death”
Career average, death in service	Enhanced: 37.5% of accrued pension, plus 37.5% of half the prospective service to Normal Pension Age multiplied by 1/57th of pensionable earnings at death

Teachers’ Pensions treats the final salary scheme as a single category here. It does not publish different fractions for the pre-2007 and post-2007 final salary sections, so a member with service in both is quoted the same 1/160 rate across them.

Children’s pensions

Section	One child	Two or more, divided equally
Final salary, adult pension payable	1/320th of final average salary per year of service from 1 April 1972	1/160th
Final salary, no adult pension	1/240th	1/120th
Career average, adult pension payable	18.75% of accrued pension	37.5%
Career average, no adult pension	25%	50%

A child qualifies if they were born during the member’s lifetime or within twelve months of the death, and are not married or in a civil partnership. They must be “Under 17; or if over 17, have remained in full-time education, or been in training for a trade or profession for at least two years, without a break of more than one academic year and up to age 23 at the latest”. A child who is “Incapacitated and unable to earn a living due to ill health at the time of your death” also qualifies, confirmed by a doctor. The pension stops if the child marries, takes up employment, or dies.

Who counts as a surviving adult

A spouse or civil partner qualifies automatically, provided the member had at least two years of pensionable service. Same-sex and opposite-sex marriages and civil partnerships are treated the same way.

An unmarried partner carries by far the heaviest burden, and this is where claims most often fail. Teachers’ Pensions requires all four of the following to have been true “for a continuous period of at least two years immediately prior to death”:

• “you were able to marry or form a civil partnership with your partner”
• “you and your partner were living with each other as if you were a married couple or civil partners”
• “neither you or your partner were living with a third person as if they were a married couple or civil partners”
• “you and your partner were financially interdependent or your partner was financially dependent on you”

On top of that there is a service gate: “A partner will qualify for a pension only if you have two years’ or more pensionable service from 1 January 2007”. Service before that date does not count towards a partner’s pension unless the member applied to buy it in, and such an application had to be made within six months of becoming a qualifying partner.

Acceptable evidence includes living at the same address or renting together, shared household spending, a joint bank account or investment, a joint loan or mortgage, naming each other as main beneficiaries, a mutual Power of Attorney, or naming each other for life assurance. Teachers’ Pensions is blunt about the consequence of having none of it: “If the survivor is unable to provide any evidence of dependency then it’s unlikely that a pension will be paid to them.”

Does remarrying stop the pension?

This is the question we would expect to be asked most, and the answer turns on a single date. Teachers’ Pensions states it directly: “If the member had pensionable employment on or after 1 January 2007 then the adult dependant’s pension will be paid for life. If the member had no pensionable employment on or after 1 January 2007, the pension will cease if the adult dependant remarries, enters a civil partnership or cohabits.”

In practice that means almost every current claim results in a pension for life, because almost every member has some service after 2007. The old rule, where a widow’s pension stopped if she remarried, only still bites where the teacher’s entire pensionable service ended before 1 January 2007. Plenty of people believe the old rule applies to them when it does not.

Four things that quietly stall a Teachers’ Pension death benefits claim

1. The McCloud decision maker

This one catches families completely unprepared, because it is invisible from the outside. If the teacher had any pensionable service between 1 April 2015 and 31 March 2022, somebody has to choose whether that service counts as final salary or career average before the benefits can be finalised. That somebody is a “decision maker” identified by Teachers’ Pensions, and it may not be you.

The scheme’s own wording: “If they pass away after 1 October 2023 and their family benefits aren’t in payment, the decision maker will need to make the choice before full benefits can be paid to any beneficiaries.” The decision maker is issued with a Remediable Service Statement and asked to choose. Until they do, the claim sits. For the background on why this choice exists at all, see our guide to the McCloud remedy.

2. The employer’s form 22A

Covered above, and worth repeating because it is the most common invisible hold-up on an in-service death. The family cannot supply it or complete it. All you can do is ask, by name, whether it has been received.

3. The £5,000 probate threshold

“If the amount payable exceeds £5,000, we will require a Grant of Probate accompanied by a letter signed by all parties named on the Probate.” Since a death grant is often three times a teacher’s salary, most claims are over the threshold, and probate is not quick. The scheme’s own advice is to start early: “You may need to apply for Probate which can take some time to arrange, therefore, it’s important to start the process as soon as possible.”

4. The partner evidence tier

An unmarried partner has to prove four conditions over two years, plus the member’s post-2007 service gate. A married claimant proves the same thing with one certificate. If you are an unmarried partner, assembling that evidence pack is the single longest task in front of you, and it is better started before the form goes in than after it comes back.

How long it takes, and the deadline that costs money

Here is a genuine gap. Teachers’ Pensions does not publish a turnaround time for death benefit claims. We looked across its member and beneficiary pages and through the Teachers’ Pension Scheme Annual Report and Accounts for 2024-25, and found no service standard, no target and no published performance figure for bereavement casework. The Civil Service scheme, by contrast, commits to up to eight weeks from a complete claim. Teachers’ families have no equivalent number to hold anyone to.

What does exist is a deadline that costs real money, and it belongs to the scheme’s clock rather than yours.

If the claim stalls

Start with the contact centre on 0345 606 6166, or +44 1227 213243 from outside the UK. Both numbers are confirmed as unchanged through the November administrator transfer. Ask three specific questions rather than a general one about progress: has form 22A been received from the employer, has a McCloud decision maker been identified and have they responded, and is any document on the B3 list still outstanding.

If that goes nowhere, the scheme has an internal dispute resolution procedure, and beyond it sits the Pensions Ombudsman. It is worth being realistic about the Ombudsman route on this particular subject. In Mr D on behalf of the Estate of Miss ND v Teachers’ Pensions, determined on 7 March 2024, a father complained that the scheme “needlessly delayed the payment of the Scheme death benefits”. The delay ran across several months of repeated requests for bank details, probate and employer confirmation. The Ombudsman did not uphold the complaint, finding those requests reasonable. Time elapsed, on its own, is not maladministration. What tends to succeed is showing that the scheme asked for something it already had, or failed to act on something you sent.

Tax, beyond the two year charge

Short-term and long-term survivor pensions are taxed as income through PAYE. The death grant is a lump sum and is treated differently.

The inheritance tax treatment of pensions changes on 6 April 2027, and it is a substantial change for executors of public sector estates generally. We have written about what that means for public sector families. What we are not going to do here is tell you where the Teachers’ Pension death grant sits within it. HMRC’s technical note carves out death in service benefits, and the general expectation among pensions lawyers is that public service scheme death in service lump sums fall outside the new charge. But Teachers’ Pensions has not published anything naming its own grants against that carve-out, and nobody we could find addresses the deferred and pensioner grants at all. If your claim is large enough for that distinction to matter, it is worth paying for an hour of a specialist’s time rather than relying on a general article, this one included.

Common questions

Do I need all the documents before I can start?

No. You can ring the contact centre and report the death before anything is assembled, and given how the two year tax clock works, there is a good argument for doing so early.

Does Tell Us Once handle this?

Tell Us Once notifies public sector schemes so that they can stop future payments. Stopping payments and claiming death benefits are two different processes, and only the first happens without you.

The teacher had service in both the old and new schemes. Which applies?

Both. Teachers’ Pensions calculates each separately and pays them as one combined pension. If any of the service falls between 1 April 2015 and 31 March 2022, a McCloud choice has to be made first.

Can I still nominate someone online?

Yes, if you are the member. My Pension Online still handles death grant nominations. It is the bereaved-relative claim route that closed on 17 August 2026.

Will the November handover to TCS affect a claim in progress?

Teachers’ Pensions has said the contact numbers and the website address stay the same through the transfer. It has not published anything about what happens to part-processed death claims across the changeover date. If a claim is open in late October, a written note of where it had reached is a sensible thing to have.

Pension Plain’s take

Withdrawing an online service is normally a footnote. This one is not, for two reasons that have nothing to do with technology.

The first is that the people affected are the least able to absorb friction. A bereaved family working through a six page form, a probate application and an employer that has never filled in a 22A is not a group with spare capacity. Removing the one route that let them do a piece of it at 11pm, on their own time, is a bigger change for them than the announcement’s two sentences suggest.

The second is the absence of a published service standard. The Civil Service scheme has one, and having a number changes what a family can reasonably ask for. Teachers’ Pensions has instead a two year deadline after which the family’s own benefit is cut by up to 45%, and no stated commitment about how quickly it will act to avoid that. Those two facts sit oddly together, and if there is one thing worth changing here, it is that.

Fact-checked: 18 August 2026