Military Pension (AFPS) Explained

Three schemes, one career: AFPS 75, AFPS 05 and AFPS 15

AFPS 75 is the 1975 generation of the scheme — the classic final-salary arrangement that most long-serving personnel who joined in the late 20th century belonged to. AFPS 05 is the 2005 generation, which replaced it for new entrants from that point. AFPS 15 is the 2015 generation, and it is the scheme that matters now: it is the current scheme, and the great majority of serving personnel are in it.

The generations were not a clean break. When each new scheme launched, transitional protections moved some personnel across on different terms depending on age and service at the changeover — the kind of detail that generates a steady stream of questions decades later. If you served across a changeover year, your pension may have elements calculated under more than one generation’s rules.

The practical question most people actually need answered is simple: which scheme am I in? For anyone who joined from 2015 onwards, the answer is AFPS 15. For longer-serving personnel, the answer depends on your service history at the changeover dates — and that is a question for your JPA record or Veterans UK, not a website.

What “career average” means under AFPS 15

AFPS 15 is a career-average scheme. That is a deliberate contrast with the final-salary design of AFPS 75, and the difference matters more than any single number in the scheme.

Under a final-salary scheme, your pension reflects what you earned near the end — the years when rank and pay are highest do almost all the work. Under a career-average scheme, every year of service builds its own slice of pension based on that year’s earnings, and each slice is revalued over time. Early years count; late promotions still help, but they do not retroactively revalue everything that came before.

The effect on career planning is real. Under career-average, steady service accumulates steadily — there is no cliff edge where the last promotion doubles the value of twenty prior years. It rewards the whole career rather than the final rank, which is arguably fairer to the majority who do not reach the senior ranks, even if it feels less dramatic.

The mechanism is described here without the scheme’s accrual rates or revaluation formulae. Those figures belong in a calculator that applies them to your actual service record — not in a guide read in isolation.

One more point worth knowing: each year’s slice is revalued over time to keep its worth, so a year served at twenty-five is not frozen in nominal terms while you serve out the rest of your career. The revaluation mechanism is set out in the official scheme booklet — another detail that belongs in verified modelling rather than in a guide, but useful context when you read your annual pension statement and wonder why the early years are worth more than you expected.

Early Departure Payments: the name to know

Early Departure Payments — EDPs — are the part of the AFPS 15 landscape that most resembles the old immediate pensions. They are payments for personnel who leave before the scheme’s full pension age but after completing a qualifying period of service: a bridge between leaving the forces and drawing the full pension.

The concept exists because military careers end early by civilian standards. Without a bridge payment, someone leaving in their forties would face a long gap with no pension income. EDPs fill that gap by design — they are not a bonus and not a redundancy payment, but a structured part of the scheme for qualifying leavers.

The qualifying conditions — how much service, at what age, and how the payments are calculated — are set out in the official scheme booklets. Because getting them wrong has serious consequences for leaving decisions, we point you to those booklets rather than paraphrasing thresholds here. The links are at the end of this guide.

What this guide deliberately does not tell you

You will notice this page contains no contribution rates, no accrual fractions, no pension ages and no worked pension examples. That is a choice, not an omission.

Every number published here is traceable to a verified source — the AFPRB report, HMRC tables — and pension figures deserve the same discipline. Printing an accrual rate from memory, or a pension age that changed with transitional protection, would be worse than printing nothing: it would look authoritative while being wrong for exactly the readers making the biggest decisions.

So here is the honest position: the scheme generations are AFPS 75, AFPS 05 and AFPS 15. AFPS 15 is the current career-average scheme. Early Departure Payments exist by name for qualifying leavers. Everything with a number attached lives in the official MOD and gov.uk scheme documents — linked below — until a dedicated calculator can model your service record properly.

What to do about your pension now

A deep AFPS calculator is planned: enter your service history — scheme, rank progression, reckonable service — and see a modelled pension projection with every assumption labelled, the way interpolated pay supplements are labelled on the pay pages.

What it will not do is guess. The calculator will only ship when its scheme rules are verified against the official booklets line by line, with every assumption labelled. A pension projection you cannot audit is not a tool; it is a horoscope.

Until then, the take-home calculators deliberately default to no pension deduction, so the figures you see are clean gross-to-net pay — and the pension question stays separate, where it belongs.

Where to get official answers

For anything that affects a real decision, use the official sources. The MOD publishes the AFPS scheme booklets — the 2015, 2005 and 1975 generations each have their own — on gov.uk, with the full rules on accrual, pension ages and Early Departure Payments. Veterans UK administers pensions in payment and handles queries from veterans. Your JPA record shows your scheme membership and reckonable service.

If you are approaching a leaving date, get a formal pension forecast through official channels before making commitments. Forums and take-home calculators are for understanding, not for deciding.

AFPS 75: what the final-salary generation meant

AFPS 75 is the 1975 generation of the scheme, and its defining feature is the final-salary design. Under that design, the pension was driven by earnings towards the end of service: the rank you held and the pay you earned in your final years did almost all the work in setting the pension’s size, while the early and middle years contributed comparatively little to the final figure.

That structure shaped a whole culture of career planning. The last promotion before leaving carried enormous financial weight, because it revalued everything that had come before it. For those who reached senior rank, AFPS 75 was exceptionally generous; for those whose careers plateaued earlier, the same scheme was markedly less rewarding — the design concentrated its value at the top.

If you served under AFPS 75 and were moved across at a later changeover, elements of your pension may still be calculated under its rules. That is one of the reasons older colleagues’ pension stories sound so different from those of recent joiners: they are describing a different scheme, not a different experience of the same one.

AFPS 05: the bridge generation

AFPS 05 is the 2005 generation, which replaced AFPS 75 for new entrants from that point. It was a staging post between the old final-salary world and the career-average world that followed: a modernisation that kept many of the familiar features of military pensions while beginning the move towards the 2015 design.

Its practical importance today is as the middle layer. Personnel who served across the 2005 changeover were subject to transitional protections that depended on age and service at the time — and the same pattern repeated at the 2015 changeover into AFPS 15. Each transition created a cohort whose benefits straddle two generations’ rules, which is why “which scheme am I in?” can have a more complicated answer than the joining date suggests.

For most readers, AFPS 05 is history rather than a live decision. But if your service spans the changeover years, understanding that the bridge generation exists — and that your record may reference it — will make your JPA statement and any Veterans UK correspondence considerably easier to read.

Five misunderstandings worth dropping

Pension myths survive because they were once true, or true for someone else. These five cause the most confusion:

• “My pension is based on my final salary.” True under AFPS 75; not true under AFPS 15, where every year’s earnings build their own slice. Applying final-salary thinking to a career-average scheme misjudges where the value lies.
• “An Early Departure Payment is a bonus for leaving.” No — EDPs are a structured bridge payment for qualifying leavers, part of the scheme’s design for careers that end decades before civilian retirement age.
• “The take-home calculators include my pension.” They do not: they default to no pension deduction and show clean gross-to-net pay. Pension modelling will come with a dedicated AFPS calculator.
• “All my service counts under one scheme.” If you served across 2005 or 2015, elements of your benefits may fall under different generations’ rules. Check your record rather than assuming.
• “A big final promotion fixes a thin early career.” That is final-salary logic. Under career-average, a late promotion helps — but it does not revalue the twenty years before it.

What to do this year: a short checklist

You do not need to become a pensions expert, but four small actions will put you ahead of most of your peers:

• Confirm your scheme on JPA. Know whether you are purely AFPS 15 or carry elements from an earlier generation — it changes which booklet applies to you.
• Read the right scheme booklet on gov.uk. The official documents are long, but the summaries at the front of each one answer most everyday questions.
• If you are within a few years of a potential leaving date, request a formal pension forecast through official channels now — not after you have made commitments.
• Sign up for the pension calculator launch alert. When verified AFPS modelling is ready, you will be able to test scenarios against your actual service history.

The pension is part of your pay — price it like one

It is easy to compare a military salary with a civilian offer line by line and miss the pension entirely. The take-home calculators show the money that lands in your account, and that is the right number for budgeting. But when you are weighing whether to stay or sign off, take-home is only half the comparison. The other half is the pension accruing behind it, year by year, while you serve.

This is why the AFPRB treats pension as part of total reward when it judges whether military pay keeps pace: strip the pension out and the comparison with civilian employment is incomplete. A civilian job offering a few thousand pounds more gross can still leave you worse off once you price in the pension you would have to fund yourself — or, in the military’s case, the scheme that builds while you serve.

The honest way to use these calculators is in two steps. Use the take-home calculators for the cash question: what lands in your account each month. Then, separately, get a formal pension forecast through official channels before any leaving decision, so the deferred half of your pay is valued with the same care as the monthly half. A dedicated pension calculator will one day bring those two halves together.