Tracking pensions: DC pots, DB promises and the State Pension

For most working households the pensions are the biggest asset after the house, and the least tracked. DC pots, DB promises and the State Pension each need a different method. Here is how to put all three into your net worth honestly, with the figures for 2026/27.

Three different things called pension

The word pension covers three quite different assets. A defined contribution (DC) pot is money invested in your name with a value you can check. A defined benefit (DB) pension is a promise of income for life from an employer's scheme. The State Pension is a promise too, from the government, earned through National Insurance. A pot has a price; a promise has to be valued. Muddling the three is why most spreadsheets either leave pensions out or write down something misleading.

DC pots: read the statement, then find the strays

A DC pension has a current value the provider will simply tell you: in their app, on the annual statement, or by phone. Record it with its date and move on; checking a few times a year is plenty for money you may not touch for decades.

The real DC problem is plural. Auto-enrolment plus ordinary job changes leaves many people with three, four or five small pots at different providers, some registered to addresses two moves ago. List every employer you have had, dig out the paperwork, and use the government's free Pension Tracing Service to find contact details for schemes you have lost track of. Recovering a forgotten pot is the fastest five- figure improvement most net worths will ever see.

DB promises: value the income

A DB statement gives you an income, say £8,000 a year from age 65, not a pot. There are two honest ways to put that into a net worth. The first is the cash equivalent transfer value, the CETV, which the scheme will quote on request: the lump sum it would hand over to be rid of the promise. It is a real, personal number, but schemes can take weeks to produce one, may charge for a second quote in the same year, and treat the request as the first step of a transfer rather than a casual valuation.

The second is a modelling convention: multiply the promised annual income by 20. The £8,000 promise becomes £160,000 in the model. Say clearly that 20 is a convention, not a market price: the true value depends on your age, the scheme's inflation linking and much else, and real CETVs land both above and below it. A labelled convention is far better than a blank row, and far safer than treating the figure as money you could bank tomorrow.

The State Pension counts too

The full new State Pension is £241.30 a week in 2026/27, which is about £12,547.60 a year. That is real, inflation-linked income for life, and it belongs in your picture. The full amount needs 35 qualifying years of National Insurance contributions; fewer years earns a proportionally smaller pension, and gaps can sometimes be filled with voluntary contributions. Do not guess at any of this: the State Pension forecast on gov.uk shows your projected amount and your NI record in minutes.

To hold it in the model you have the same two choices as a DB promise: capitalise the annual amount, times 20 as a labelled convention, or track it as future income in your planning rather than an asset in today's total. Either is defensible. Pick one, label it, and stay consistent so the history means something.

Why no app can do this for you yet

You might reasonably expect software to fetch all of this automatically. It cannot, yet. The Pensions Dashboards Programme is connecting UK schemes to a shared lookup service, and schemes have been connecting through 2025 and 2026, but the public dashboard is not consumer-live and is not expected to be until around 2027 or 2028. Until then, no app can pull your pensions the way open banking tools pull bank balances.

So honest pension tracking today is manual: statements in, values and conventions recorded, dates stamped. WealthWelly is built around that reality, with first-class manual entry for DC values, DB incomes and your State Pension forecast, each labelled for what it is, instead of pretending a feed exists. Put the numbers in once and the picture stops lying by omission; the spreadsheet guide shows the same shape if you would rather build it yourself.

This guide is general information, not financial advice; if you are unsure what is right for your circumstances, speak to a regulated financial adviser.