Your NCHA pension
Our workplace pension is called the Social Housing Pension Scheme (SHPS).
When you join NCHA, you’ll be enrolled in our scheme, which is a defined contribution (DC) scheme. With a DC pension you build up a pot of money that you can then use to provide an income in retirement.
At NCHA, the initial contribution you pay towards your pension is 3% and NCHA pays 5%.
Your pension options
Once you’re enrolled, you have a number of other pension options open to you and there are 30 days for you to decide which one best suits you:
- Increase your pension contributions to either 6%, 7.5% or 10%, which will be matched by NCHA contributions to help you build a bigger pension pot, or
- Opt out of the pension scheme and get a refund on the contributions you made in the first month.
Our payroll team will write to you once you’ve been enrolled in the scheme and remind you of the options.
Salary sacrifice
At NCHA we use a salary sacrifice scheme to make pensions more affordable. This is an arrangement where you agree to reduce your salary by an amount equal to your pension contributions, and NCHA agrees to pay those contributions on your behalf. Salary sacrifice enables you, and NCHA, to pay lower National Insurance contributions – so while the amount going into your pension is the same, your take home pay is actually higher under salary sacrifice. If you earn £15,000 per year, contributing 3% to your pension using salary sacrifice will save you about £59 per year. Your pension is not affected, you just save money.
There’s more information about salary sacrifice on our intranet which you can access when you join. However, for some people, because of personal circumstances or because of their job role, this approach may not be suitable. If salary sacrifice isn’t for you then you have the choice to opt out when you start.
If you decide at a later date to opt into or out of salary sacrifice, or that you want to change your pension contributions (up or down), you can do this between April and May each year to take effect in July.
