Pension carry forward calculator

Unused annual allowance from the three immediately preceding tax years can be carried forward and added to the current year's allowance — current year first, then the oldest of the three, then forward. Allowance unused from a tapered year is the unused part of the TAPERED figure for that year, not the standard one.

Carry-forward only arises from a year in which the individual was a member of a registered pension scheme — any scheme, with or without contributions. A year with no membership at all contributes nothing, however long ago the scheme was joined.

A common error: treating a money-purchase annual allowance trigger as erasing the carry-forward pot. It does not. Carry-forward survives — it simply can never be added to the MPAA itself. It remains available for the default chargeable-amount test and for the defined-benefit alternative allowance.

This is the trap that turns a clean carry-forward figure into an unrelievable contribution. Carry-forward enlarges the annual allowanceonly. Tax relief on the member's own contributions is separately capped at the greater of 100% of their relevant UK earnings for the year of payment and the £3,600 gross basic amount — a cap prior-year headroom cannot touch. A member with £45,000 of earnings and £150,000 of carry-forward can personally contribute £45,000 with relief, not £195,000. Employer contributions are outside the earnings limit, which is why a large carry-forward position is usually funded from the employer side.

Carry-forward is not three independent balances. Where an intervening year in the window had a breach of its own — that year's pension input exceeding that year's applicable allowance — unused allowance from older years is set against it first, oldest year first, before any of it can reach the current year. Reading each prior year in isolation therefore overstates what is actually available. The engine runs that set-off ledger sequentially across the years supplied.