The evidence
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General information, not advice on your own case.
Pensions are often the second largest asset in a marriage, after the family home. Yet the best available research shows they are hardly ever divided. In the Fair Shares? study of divorce in England and Wales, only 11% of couples where either spouse had a pension not yet in payment made any pension sharing arrangement at all. It is not mainly a knowledge problem: most people know a pension can be shared. It is a mix of how people think about pensions, not knowing what they are worth, worry about the cost of advice, and the fact that a pension can only be shared by a court order. This page sets out what the evidence says and what it means for you.
The figures on this page come from Fair Shares? Sorting out money and property on divorce, a study led by Professor Emma Hitchings at the University of Bristol and funded by the Nuffield Foundation, published in 2023.
It matters because of how it was done. The researchers surveyed 2,415 people who had divorced in England and Wales, with fieldwork carried out in August and September 2022, and followed the survey with in depth interviews. It is the first fully representative study of financial arrangements on divorce in England and Wales.
That word “representative” is doing a lot of work. Most of what is written about money on divorce is drawn either from reported court cases (which are, by definition, the disputed and unusual ones) or from the caseloads of individual firms. Fair Shares? looked at the whole population of divorcing people, including the large majority who never see the inside of a courtroom and many who never take legal advice at all. So it shows what ordinarily happens, not what happens when things go wrong.
Read that second bullet carefully, because it is easy to misread. It describes people giving away a share of their own pension. It does not mean that only 3% of women received a share of anything.
On the receiving side the picture was different:
Both numbers are still small.
Two pieces of jargon there, and they matter more than they sound. A defined contribution pension is a pot of money, and the pot value is roughly what it says on the statement. A defined benefit pension (sometimes called final salary or career average, and the type used by the NHS, teachers, the armed forces, local government, the police and the civil service) is a promise of an income for life, and the single “transfer value” figure the scheme gives you is a conversion of that promise into a capital sum on the scheme’s own basis. The two types are not directly comparable, even when the headline numbers look similar. Not knowing which one you are dealing with makes it very hard to judge whether a settlement is fair.
Among the cases where a pension was shared:
The researchers were clear that this is based on a small number of cases (142), so treat it as an indication rather than a precise measure. It is worth saying too that a 50:50 split of a pension is not automatically the right answer. The correct percentage depends on the length of the marriage, whether the aim is to equalise capital or income, the ages of the parties and what else is being divided. The point is not that everything should be halved. The point is that the actual splits cluster well below half.
Both are intuitive. Neither explains the overall picture, because plenty of long marriages with substantial pensions still ended without any pension being shared.
This is the finding that upends the usual assumption:
Knowledge, on its own, is not the barrier.
Public understanding is nonetheless poor. Among the general public, 54% either wrongly believe there is no entitlement to a share of an ex spouse’s pension (22%) or simply do not know (32%).
The research points to four things working together.
The interviews found that pensions were “largely seen by interviewees as ‘belonging’ to the individual spouse rather than as a product of the marriage.” A house bought together feels like a shared asset. A pension with one name on the statement feels like personal property, even when it was built up during the marriage while the other spouse was raising children or working part time.
The law does not see it that way. In England and Wales, pension rights built up during a marriage are part of the pot of resources the court considers, whoever’s name is on them.
Divorcees told the researchers that pensions “never came up” in their discussions, “including even when both parties were represented by solicitors.” If nobody raises it, nothing happens, and the default outcome is that the person who holds the pension keeps all of it.
And advice appears to change outcomes. Men who used a lawyer were about 70% more likely to share a pension (17% against 10%).
This one is not about attitudes at all, and it is the piece most people miss.
You cannot divide a pension by private agreement, and you cannot do it with a separation agreement or a handshake. A pension is only divided when a court makes a pension sharing order and the scheme implements it. Even where a couple agree everything between themselves, the agreement has to be put into a consent order and approved and sealed by the court before any pension can move.
So a couple who deliberately keep out of court, to save money or stress, have by that decision ruled out sharing a pension, whether they realise it or not. Given how many people divorce without ever obtaining a financial order, that alone accounts for a large part of the gap.
The researchers’ own verdict is blunt:
“At the turn of the millennium, reformers thought that they had solved this problem by legislating to provide for forms of pension sharing, yet it is clear that this is simply not happening.”
The consequences land unevenly. The study found that 55% of fathers with dependent children left the marriage with more than three quarters of the couple’s combined pension wealth, compared with 43% of mothers. In other words, in most families with children, one person walked away with the overwhelming majority of the retirement provision, and more often than not that person was the father.
A house is divided today and you can see the money. A pension is divided for a version of yourself that is 20 or 30 years away, and it is very easy to trade it away for something tangible now without understanding what you have given up.
None of this says that your pension should be shared. Plenty of settlements are perfectly fair without a pension share, particularly after short marriages, where pensions are small or similar, or where offsetting genuinely works. What the evidence does say is that the decision should be a decision, made with the numbers in front of you, rather than something that happens by default because nobody mentioned it.
Practically, that means:
You can find independent Pension on Divorce Experts through the PODE.expert directory.
Source: Hitchings, E. and colleagues (2023), Fair Shares? Sorting out money and property on divorce, University of Bristol, funded by the Nuffield Foundation. Survey of 2,415 divorcees in England and Wales, fieldwork August to September 2022, with follow up qualitative interviews.
This page is general information about the law of England and Wales. It is not legal or financial advice about your own circumstances.
October 2026
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