The One Page That Sits Outside Your Will: Your Pension Nomination Form

Most people assume their Will covers everything they own. It doesn’t. There’s one page, tucked away in a pension file somewhere, that decides who gets one of the biggest assets many of us will ever hold — and it sits completely outside your Will. It’s called the expression of wish form, sometimes just called a nomination, and it’s worth ten minutes of your time.

Why your Will doesn’t control your pension

Most modern workplace and personal pensions are set up as discretionary trusts. That’s a mouthful, but the idea is simple: the money in your pension pot isn’t legally “yours” to leave in your Will in the way your house or savings are. Instead, it sits inside a trust structure run by the pension scheme’s trustees, and when you die, those trustees decide who receives the death benefit.

This is actually a good thing for tax reasons — it’s part of why pensions have traditionally sat outside your estate for Inheritance Tax purposes. But it means the people who decide where your pension money goes are the trustees, not you directly, and not your executors. Your Will has no say in the matter at all.

The form that actually does the job

So how do you have any influence? Through the expression of wish form — sometimes called a nomination form, a beneficiary nomination, or a death benefit nomination depending on the provider. This is where you tell the trustees who you’d like the money to go to, and in what proportions.

The important word there is “expression”. In the vast majority of pensions, this form is a strong steer rather than a binding instruction. The trustees will normally follow it, but they have discretion to depart from it — for example if your circumstances have clearly changed since you filled it in, or if someone you nominated has since died. This discretion is actually helpful, because it can let the money pass more flexibly and tax-efficiently than a rigid instruction would allow.

There are exceptions. A small number of schemes — often older public-sector or final-salary schemes — use a binding nomination, where the trustees must follow your instruction to the letter. If you have one of these, it’s worth knowing which type you’re dealing with, because the flexibility described above doesn’t apply.

Crucially, this form isn’t held by us, and it isn’t stored with your Will. It sits with the pension provider or scheme administrator, in their own systems, separate from every other part of your estate planning.

Why these forms go quietly out of date

This isn’t anyone’s fault — it’s just how life moves faster than paperwork. A nomination made at 26, in your first job, for a pension you left at 31, might still be sitting on file naming a partner you’re no longer with. Divorce and remarriage are the most common triggers we see: the ex-partner is still nominated because nobody thought to change it. A new child or grandchild arrives and isn’t added. A partner you’re not married to may not automatically be able to receive anything without a form in place naming them, however long you’ve been together.

Add in the fact that most of us have several pension pots by the time we retire — a workplace scheme from one employer, a personal pension we started ourselves, an old final-salary pot from a job in the 1990s — and each one has its own separate form, its own provider, and its own paperwork trail. It’s entirely normal to lose track of which forms exist, what they say, and whether they still reflect what you want.

We raise this with every client not because anything has gone wrong, but because it’s simply good housekeeping. Your Will can be perfectly sound and up to date, and your pension nomination can still be years out of step with your actual wishes — the two things are entirely separate and one doesn’t tell you anything about the other.

What to actually do about it

The good news is this is one of the easiest bits of estate planning to put right. It takes an afternoon, not a solicitor’s appointment.

• List every pension pot you have — current workplace scheme, any old employer schemes, personal pensions, anything you’re not sure about. If you’ve lost track, a pension provider search or checking old paperwork will usually turn them up.
• Contact each provider and ask, in writing, for an up-to-date expression of wish form. Most now offer this online, but a written request creates a paper trail.
• Fill in each one properly — full names, dates of birth, and clear percentages if you’re splitting the benefit between people.
• Keep copies of every form you submit, along with the confirmation from the provider that it’s been received and recorded.
• Tell your executors, or whoever is likely to be dealing with your affairs, where these copies are kept. They’ll need to know which providers to contact and that these forms exist separately from your Will.

Do this once, properly, and then simply revisit it whenever something in your life changes — a new relationship, a new child or grandchild, a divorce, or a house move that comes with a new pension provider.

Nomination or binding direction — know which one you have

It’s worth being clear about the difference between the two, because they behave quite differently. A nomination, or expression of wish, is exactly what it sounds like — a wish. The trustees will normally follow it, and in practice they usually do, but they retain the discretion to depart from it if circumstances have clearly moved on since you filled it in. This flexibility is often a good thing: it can allow the death benefit to pass more efficiently, or to someone whose need has genuinely changed, without you having to update paperwork every few months.

A binding direction is different, and rarer. Some older schemes, particularly certain public-sector and final-salary arrangements, allow you to give the trustees an instruction they are legally required to follow rather than simply a wish they will normally respect. If you have a pension of this type, it’s worth finding out from the scheme directly whether your nomination is binding or discretionary, because the consequences of an out-of-date form are more serious if it is binding — there’s no trustee discretion to correct course if your circumstances have changed and the form hasn’t.

Either way, the principle is the same: the form needs to reflect your current life, not the life you were living when you filled it in.

The 2027 change that makes this more important

From 6 April 2027, unused pension funds will come into the scope of Inheritance Tax for the first time. Until now, most pension money has sat outside your estate for tax purposes, which is one of the reasons pensions have been such a popular way to pass on wealth. From that date, that will change.

This doesn’t alter who decides where the money goes — the trustees still make that decision, guided by your expression of wish form, exactly as before. What changes is that the value of an unused pension may now also affect the overall tax position of your estate. That means the nomination and the tax planning can no longer be looked at as two separate things sitting in different drawers. Who you nominate, how the benefit is split, and how that interacts with the rest of your estate all need to be considered together.

This is exactly the kind of joined-up thinking we build into a full estate plan — not because your existing arrangements are wrong, but because a change in the rules is a natural moment to check everything still fits together.

A small form, a big difference

The expression of wish form doesn’t get much attention because it doesn’t feel like “proper” estate planning — there’s no solicitor involved, no signing ceremony, just a form on a pension provider’s website. But it’s often the single document that decides where a large chunk of your wealth ends up. Getting it right, and keeping it current, is one of the simplest, most valuable half-hours you can spend on your affairs this year.

If you’d like to talk through your pensions alongside the rest of your estate plan — including how the 2027 changes might affect your family — book a Discovery Call with us. We’re always happy to help you join the dots.