The evidence
Home › Resources › The long view: why the pension decision outlasts the divorce
General information, not advice on your own case.
Of all the decisions made in a divorce, the one about pensions is the one you live with longest. It is also the one people look at least closely. Research shows that pensions are rarely shared, and separate research on today’s pensioners shows what that population looks like decades later. This page sets out both, and what it means for the decision in front of you.
Most of what you decide in a divorce has a horizon you can picture. Where the children live. Who keeps the house. How much is paid each month and for how long.
The pension is different. It is a decision about a version of yourself that is twenty or thirty years away, made at a moment when you are dealing with this week. That mismatch is the whole problem, and it is not a failing on anyone’s part. It is simply very hard to feel the weight of something that far off.
It is worth pausing on it anyway, because unlike almost everything else in a settlement, the pension decision is close to permanent. Once a financial order is sealed, it is generally final. There is usually no going back to it years later when the consequences become visible.
The most detailed study we have of what actually happens on divorce in England and Wales is the Fair Shares project, carried out by the University of Bristol and funded by the Nuffield Foundation. It surveyed 2,415 divorcees.
It found that among couples where at least one person had a pension not yet in payment, only 11 per cent made any pension sharing arrangement at all.
It also found that this was not mainly a knowledge problem. 57 per cent of divorcees correctly knew that a pension could be shared. Only around one in ten did it. The barrier was not that people did not know the option existed. It was that pensions were, in the researchers’ words, “largely seen by interviewees as belonging to the individual spouse rather than as a product of the marriage”.
Alongside that, 37 per cent of people with a pension did not know what it was worth, and 24 per cent did not know whether their former spouse had a pension at all.
Separate work published in August 2026 by Steve Webb, a partner at the actuarial consultancy LCP and a former Pensions Minister, looked at single pensioners today. It reported that:
The paper asks the Pensions Commission to look at several things, including strengthening pension saving for lower-earning partners and reviewing what happens to pensions when a cohabiting relationship breaks down.
These are two separate pieces of research, looking at different groups of people at different points in their lives. Neither was designed to prove anything about the other.
Plenty of things affect whether someone is poor in retirement. Career breaks, part-time work, low pay, ill health, caring responsibilities, the cost of housing and how long someone lives all play a part. It would be wrong to say that unshared pensions on divorce are the cause of single pensioner poverty.
What can fairly be said is this. We know pensions are very rarely shared when couples divorce. We know the number of divorced single pensioners has tripled, and that this group is disproportionately female and disproportionately poor. Those two facts sit together uncomfortably, and they are worth knowing about before you make your own decision.
A few things make the pension easy to set aside.
It does not feel like money. A house is somewhere you stand. A pension is a statement, in language that seems built to put people off.
The house carries the feeling. It is where the children sleep, and it matters tonight in a way that retirement does not.
The headline number can mislead. A pension’s cash equivalent looks like a price tag, but it is calculated for the scheme’s own purposes and is not always a fair measure of what the pension is worth when set against other assets. This is particularly true of defined benefit pensions, where the value lies in a guaranteed income rather than a pot of money.
Nobody may raise it. Divorcees in the Fair Shares study repeatedly said pensions “never came up” in discussions, including in cases where both people had solicitors.
None of this means every divorce needs a pension expert, or that every pension should be shared. Many couples have small or similar pensions and the sensible answer is quick to reach.
It does mean the pension deserves a proper look before it is traded away, rather than after. In practice that means three things.
Find out what is there. Both of you, including old workplace schemes people often forget.
Find out what it is actually worth, rather than assuming the headline figure tells you. Where there is a defined benefit pension in the picture, that usually needs someone who can assess it properly.
Decide deliberately. Sharing, offsetting and keeping your own pensions are all legitimate outcomes. What matters is that you chose one, knowing what you were choosing, rather than arriving at it by default.
October 2026
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