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Start taking your benefits

Understand what you need to do when you’re ready to start taking some – or all – of what you’ve built up

What do you need to do?

When you’re ready to start taking your benefits and savings, what you need to do will depend on whether you want to access your Retirement Income Builder benefits, your Investment Builder savings (if you have these too), or both.

Take a look at taking your benefits and savings to see your options. Or visit your options at different ages and stages to see what you can do when.

Once you’re ready to kick-start the retirement process, you’ll need to contact your employer first, as you need to agree your retirement date with them. They’ll then submit a retirement form to us on your behalf and we’ll then send a retirement quote back.

Take a look at our timeline to retirement for how the process works and how long it takes.

Your pension pay day

We’ll pay your pension into a UK bank or building society on the 21st of each month. But if this falls on a weekend or bank holiday, we’ll pay you on the last working day before the 21st.

We’ll pay your one-off, cash lump sum on the first working day after your retirement date (if all your forms are received on time).

You’ll get a payslip when you receive your first pension payment, and then every April after that. You’ll also receive a payslip if your net monthly pension changes by £1 or more. This may happen if your tax code changes or if the tax bands are updated.

Don’t forget about your State Pension

Remember, once you reach the State Pension age (SPA), you may also get a State Pension to help towards your retirement plans.

Check your SPA and find out everything you need to know about your State Pension.

Paying your income tax

We’ll work out how much income tax you need to pay using the tax code on your P45. Your employer should give us Parts 2 and 3 when you retire (you keep Part 1A). If they send these sections to you, please send them to us using this address:

FAO Pensions Payroll
Universities Superannuation Scheme Limited
Royal Liver Building
Liverpool L3 1PY

If we don’t receive this information, we’ll apply an emergency tax code to your pension payments.

Once you start receiving your pension, we’ll let HMRC know. If we need to apply a different tax code, they’ll let us know – and they’ll contact you too.

To find out more about other tax implications that may affect your pension, take a look at pension tax.

Keep us up to date

It’s really important that you keep your details up to date so we can get in touch with you.

If you haven’t already, register for My USS to manage your pension. Here, you can add your personal email address, so we can send your pension information to you once you've retired.

To update your address, you can either log in to My USS or give our Member Service Team a call on 0333 300 1043. For anything else you can complete a Notification of change in details form and return this to us.

We recommend reviewing your Expression of Wish and Registration of potential dependant forms at least every three years so we know they’re up to date. And to make sure the decisions you’ve made are still right for you.

Log in to My USS to complete these online or download the Expression of Wish form or Registration of potential dependant form to print and return to us.

If you still have Investment Builder savings, it’s important that you keep your Target Retirement Age (TRA) up to date. It allows us to automatically move any investments you have in the Investment Builder to lower risk funds as you get closer to retirement. You can view or update your TRA in My USS

Got a question?