The form that overrides your will, and almost nobody has updated it

The most consequential piece of paperwork most people own is not their will.

It is a single-page form, usually completed on a first day at a new job, somewhere between the fire safety briefing and finding out where the good coffee is. Most people fill it in without reading it properly. Almost nobody has looked at it since.

It decides where their pension goes when they die. And it beats the will.

Why the will doesn't govern it

Most pensions are held under trust. The scheme trustees, not you, decide who receives the death benefits.

That sounds alarming and it is actually deliberate. Because the trustees hold the discretion, the pension sits outside your estate for probate. It pays out quickly, in weeks rather than the months probate takes, and it has historically sat outside inheritance tax as well.

The price of that treatment is that your wishes are not binding. What you get instead is an expression of wish, sometimes called a nomination form: your instruction to the trustees about who you would like the money to go to.

In practice, trustees follow a clear and current expression of wish in the overwhelming majority of cases. They are not looking for reasons to override you.

The problems arise when there is nothing to follow.

What actually goes wrong

Consider what a fairly ordinary life does to that form.

Someone starts a job at 24 and names their mother, because at 24 there is nobody else obvious. They marry at 31. They have children at 34 and 37. They divorce at 45. They remarry at 49. They change jobs four times along the way, leaving four pensions behind them.

Every one of those forms is still sitting with its original scheme, naming whoever seemed right on the day it was signed. One names a mother who has since died. One names an ex-spouse. Two name nobody at all, because the form was never returned.

The current partner, who has been there for a decade, is named on none of them.

The trustees are not being unreasonable when this goes wrong. They are trying to work out what someone wanted from evidence that stopped being true fifteen years ago.

Two situations where this bites hardest

Unmarried partners. If you are not married or in a civil partnership, your partner has no automatic claim on anything. There is no such thing as common law marriage in England and Wales, whatever people believe. If the expression of wish does not name them, trustees may look to blood relatives instead, and your partner is reliant on making a case rather than on a right.

For unmarried couples this form is not administration. It is one of the main things standing between a surviving partner and a serious problem.

Second marriages. Where there are children from a first marriage and a spouse from a second, an out-of-date form can produce exactly the outcome the deceased spent years trying to avoid. The will may be beautifully drafted. The pension does not read it.

The bit that has just got more important

From April 2027, unused pension funds are expected to fall within the estate for inheritance tax.

That does not change who the trustees pay. It does change how much reaches them, and it makes who receives the money, and how they take it, matter more than it used to.

There is also a second decision hiding behind the first, and it is worth knowing about. Depending on the scheme, a beneficiary may be able to take the money as beneficiary drawdown rather than as a lump sum: keeping it in a pension wrapper, invested and tax-free internally, drawing it down over years rather than taking it all in one tax year at their marginal rate.

For an adult child in their peak earning years, the difference between those two options can be very large indeed. Not every scheme offers it. That is worth checking, and it is a legitimate reason to consider consolidating an old pot into a modern scheme, provided you are not giving up guarantees to do it.

Naming more than one person

You can split it. A percentage each, in whatever proportions you like.

This is more useful than it sounds, because beneficiaries pay tax at their own rates. Splitting between a higher-rate-taxpaying adult child and a retired spouse produces a different total tax bill from leaving it all to one of them.

You can also name someone and add a letter of wishes explaining your reasoning, which is not binding but gives trustees context. Where a family situation is complicated, that context is worth more than the form alone.

The honest complications

It is a wish, not an instruction. Trustees retain discretion and can depart from it, though in practice they rarely do without a reason. If your circumstances are unusual, or if someone financially dependent on you is not named, expect the trustees to ask questions.

Different schemes, different forms. There is no central register. Every pension you have needs its own, and the old ones are the ones most likely to be wrong.

Defined benefit schemes work differently. Many pay a spouse's or civil partner's pension automatically, and some require an unmarried partner to be formally nominated and sometimes to prove financial dependency. The form matters differently, but it still matters.

It is not the whole picture. Death in service cover at work usually has its own separate nomination. Life policies should be written in trust, which is a different mechanism doing a similar job. And your will still governs everything the pension doesn't.

And it does not replace a will. It sits alongside one. If you do not have a will, updating a pension form has solved a small part of a much larger problem.

What to actually do

Make a list of every pension you have ever had, including the ones from jobs you barely remember. If you cannot remember them all, the government's Pension Tracing Service is free and will find the schemes for you.

Then contact each provider and ask two questions: what does my current expression of wish say, and do you offer beneficiary drawdown?

Update anything that is wrong. Most providers now let you do it online in a few minutes.

Then tell someone the pensions exist. A perfectly completed form is no use if nobody knows to look for it.

It is an afternoon. It is the highest-value afternoon of admin available to most people, and it costs nothing but the time.

---

This article is for general information and is not personal advice. Pension death benefits depend on scheme rules and on trustee discretion, and the April 2027 inheritance tax changes were not finalised at the time of writing.

If you would like to talk any of this through, get in touch.