COPE

[freespeech]

I was on the Gov website earlier and was advised that I have a contracted out pension equivalent of nearly £70 per week which is paid as "part of your other pension schemes". As I only have RM pensions I've never seen this mentioned or included. Any thoughts?

[RobertT]

Anyone who's been a member of the RMSPS/RMPP and joined anytime before 31st March 2008, will have been contracted out of the state second pension, also known as S2P & additional state pension. That was the case until contracting out was stopped in 2016!
Members of the RMDCP have never been contracted out.

The whole point of contracting out was that your employers scheme would give you at least as much pension as you would have got if you'd been contracted in to S2P.

The Contracted Out Pension Equivalent(COPE) amount is therefore an estimate of how much of your RM pension is as a result of being contracted out. In your case £70 per week.

Any other contracted out pension that you might have, will also be taken into account when working out the COPE figure.

COPE has never been mentioned on RM pension statements, but has been a feature of state pension forecasts since 2015.

In practice the only really important figures on the state pension forecast/Gov website, are what your state pension is worth today and what it might be worth once you've reached state pension age.