By Jonathan Cribb & Laurence O’Brien

Self-employed workers make up a significant part of the UK workforce, with over one-in-eight workers in self-employment. However, there are long-standing concerns about low levels of pension saving among this group: only 20% of working-age self-employed workers were saving in a private pension in 2022–23, compared with around 80% of employees (Department for Work and Pensions, 2025a). The trends in pension participation differ markedly between the two groups. In the late 1990s, almost 50% of self-employed workers saved in a private pension; however, this share fell substantially through the 2000s, and has hovered around 20% since the early 2010s. In contrast, pension participation for employees has risen significantly in recent years, from almost 50% in 2012 to around 80% in 2022–23, principally due to the roll-out of automatic enrolment into pension saving between 2012 and 2018. While automatic enrolment has made pension saving much easier for employees, self-employed workers are not covered as they have no employer to automatically enrol them into a pension scheme.

As a result, there is considerable policy focus on the drivers of low levels of pension saving among the self-employed and how to boost saving among this group. Previous research has shown that only around one-third of the fall in pension participation rates for the long-term self-employed between the mid 2000s and the mid 2010s can be explained by the changing composition of the self-employed workforce (such as lower levels of income) (Karjalainen, 2023).

In this report, we instead focus on the pension saving behaviour of workers who are newly self-employed – specifically, those who have moved from being an employee into self-employment. We provide novel evidence of how pension participation and contributions evolve for employees who move into self-employment using newly linked tax data and administrative data from pension providers, and show how these responses differ for different groups of workers. This is important in understanding whether experiences with pension saving for employees translate into higher (or lower) levels of pension saving when they move into self-employment, and in assessing policy suggestions such as facilitating self-employed workers to continue contributing to a previous workplace pension scheme.

Get the report here