This booklet section is your guide to the Falkland Islands Pensions Scheme (the Scheme). The Scheme provides a range of benefits including a pension for life when you reach retirement age and pensions for your spouse and dependants on your death. It also gives you options to move between employers within the Falkland Islands, to pay extra contributions to increase the amount of your benefits, to defer payment of your pension until age 75 if your normal retirement age is earlier and to take a reduced pension in return for a maximum 25% tax-free lump sum at retirement. The Scheme also offers "portability", allowing members to transfer existing pension funds into the Scheme, and to transfer their pension funds out of the Scheme into other pension schemes offering similar benefits.

The Scheme is known as a "defined contribution" scheme or a "money purchase" scheme. This means that contributions are based on a percentage of salary and these contributions are paid into a fund along with contributions from other members of the Scheme. This fund is managed by the Pensions Board (the Board) and investment income is credited to the Individual Accounts of all members in proportion to the size of their individual funds within the Scheme. The total of a member’s Individual Account is used at retirement to purchase the pension and provide the optional lump sum.

For Falkland Islands Government (Government) employees the Scheme:

	is non-contributory, in that the Government makes the contributions on behalf of its employees without making any deductions from salary,
	provides death benefit (a form of life assurance cover) during service;
	is the successor to the Established and Unestablished pension arrangements that were previously in force. (The provisions of these previous arrangements no longer apply to employees who opted for the new employment package with effect from 1 January 1997. These arrangements were known as "defined benefit" schemes as the benefits (pension etc.) were related to the length of service and final salary of the member).

Note: throughout this site those provisions which apply to Government employees are in orange.

The Scheme is approved by the Commissioner of Taxation as an approved Scheme under the Taxes Ordinance 1997 which allows us to take advantage of the tax concessions available to such schemes.