Hundred SummersPension carry-forward calculator: the taper done properly
This year's annual allowance (tapered on your income where it must be) plus the unused allowance from each of the last three years, each tapered on its own year's income, which is the part hand-waving estimates skip. The same taper function the Hundred Summers engine uses. Your figures never leave your browser.
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Worked example
Computed when this page was built by the same engine that runs the calculator above, so the figures below and the live tool can never disagree. Change any input above to see your own.
| Inputs | |
|---|---|
| This year's adjusted income | £180,000 |
| Last year | £170,000 income, £30,000 paid in |
| Two years ago | £160,000 income, £20,000 paid in |
| Three years ago | £150,000 income, £20,000 paid in |
| Results | |
|---|---|
| This year's annual allowance | £60,000 |
| Unused allowance carried forward | £110,000 |
| Maximum contribution this year | £170,000 |
The next question
Is my annual allowance tapered? →Tapered annual allowance calculator
Or answer it with everything else: the full Hundred Summers plan connects your pay, pensions, savings, property, tax and spending year by year, and stress-tests them across 500 simulated market histories.
Read the guides
- Optimising your plan: every lever, which ones apply to you, and how they fit together →The overview of every way a UK retirement plan can be improved (tax while you work, where your savings go, how you draw it down and what your estate pays) with a decision tree that finds the levers relevant to you, the combinations that pull against each other, and how to test them in Hundred Summers. Each lever links to the guide that goes deeper. Education, not advice.
- The pension annual allowance taper, explained →How the £60,000 pension annual allowance shrinks for high earners: adjusted income over £260,000, threshold income over £200,000, the £1-for-£2 taper down to £10,000, with worked examples.
- The MPAA: the £10,000 trap that outlasts the decision that sprang it →Take one flexible pension withdrawal and your annual allowance drops from £60,000 to £10,000: permanently, with no carry-forward. What triggers the Money Purchase Annual Allowance, what doesn't, and who it ambushes.
- Redundancy: the tax playbook →The £30,000 exemption, what PILON really is, why the excess lands in your worst tax year, and the pension move that can save 40–60%: the decisions that must be made before the settlement agreement is signed.
- Bonuses: why so much disappears, and the move that keeps it →A bonus is taxed as the top slice of the year's pay, so it lands at your highest rate plus NI (42% gone for a higher-rate earner, more in the 60% zone), and a bonus sacrificed into a pension is the best-relieved contribution most employees ever make.
Why this needs a calculator at all
The annual allowance is £60,000, unless your adjusted income that year exceeded £260,000 (with threshold income above £200,000), in which case it tapered away at £1 for every £2, to a floor of £10,000. Carry-forward brings in the unused part of each of the last three years' allowances: each tapered on its own year's income. High earners with variable income routinely get this wrong in both directions.
What still binds
Relief on personal contributions is capped at 100% of this year's earnings however much allowance you have (employer contributions aren't); carry-forward requires scheme membership in the source year and is consumed oldest-first; and one flexible withdrawal anywhere triggers the £10,000 MPAA with no carry-forward at all. The taper guide walks the definitions; the full Hundred Summers plan models allowance, taper, carry-forward and MPAA inside your whole projection.