The NHS pension is often a mis-understood financial benefit that many employees generally just forget about. They know a lot of money gets taken from their payslips with the assumption they'll get it back later when they retire. I recently decided to look into it further so I thought it'd be useful for me to break it down as easily as I can. First this to say is that the NHS pension is a defined-benefit (DB) scheme, not a defined-contribution (DC) scheme. What you pay in is not added to some pot of money; it's better thinking of it as a membership fee. There are two NHS pension schemes, the old 1995 final salary scheme and the newer 2015 Career Average Revalued Earnings scheme (CARE). I'll go over the 2015 scheme as it is applicable to most people now (and what I am mostly in). The NHS pension is a guaranteed income for life upon retirement. It is index-linked, meaning that it will increase with inflation (Consumer Price Inflation) every year. This sort of scheme is r...