Aviva pensions review

Aviva offers a well-rounded self-invested personal pension (SIPP). It’s designed to let you choose how your money is invested and is flexible for you to make changes when you need. If you want to, you can simplify your by consolidating all of your pension pots into one. Find out how it works, key features, fees, and what your investment options are.

What is Aviva?

Aviva is one of the biggest and best-known financial service providers in the UK, with a heritage that can be traced back to 1696. It’s best-known for its insurance products – from car insurance to health insurance. But it also provides both workplace and personal pensions. In this review, we’ll be focusing on its private pension offering.

How does the Aviva pension work?

Aviva’s SIPP is a form of personal private pension. A private pension is a pension pot that’s completely separate from your workplace pension and state pension. Unlike a workplace pension, it’s set up and paid into by you. It’s kind of like an investment account that you can’t access until you turn 55 (rising to 57 from 2028), but hopefully the pot grows as your investments increase in value.

Aviva’s SIPP allows you to pay in lump sums, or set up a monthly contribution. If you set up monthly payments, the minimum monthly amount is £25. Once you’ve set up monthly contributions you can also make a minimum one-off payment of £1,000. If you only want to put in a lump sum, without setting up a monthly payment, the minimum initial deposit is £5,000.

As with contributions to any pension, Aviva claims basic pension tax relief of 20% on any contributions you pay in and adds it to your pot. So for every £80 paid in, £100 goes into your pension. If you’re a higher or additional rate taxpayer, you can claim additional tax relief from HMRC.

Aviva offers a range of investment options to suit different experience levels, from ready-made portfolios to suit novice investors, to picking out the individual investments or funds that make up your pension.

Fees and costs for the Aviva pension

As with all pensions, you’ll incur fees for the ongoing management of your Aviva SIPP.

The charges you’ll incur depend on whether your pension contains funds or shares (or a mix of both).

Charges are calculated daily and taken monthly from the money in your cash account. If you don’t have enough money in your cash account, fees will be taken out of your investments instead.

If you invest in funds

If your pension includes funds, you’ll incur two types of charge for this part of your pension.

Aviva charge. This is Aviva’s annual charge for holding any of the investment funds it offers. This charge is tiered depending on the total value of your investments, as outlined in the table below.

Fund manager charges. This varies depending on the specific fund(s) you hold, and can be found on the Key Investor Information Document (KID) for each fund. In the example Aviva gives on its website, it cites an illustrative fund manager charge of 0.35%.

If you invest in shares and other exchange traded investments

If you hold UK shares, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) or investment trusts in your pension portfolio, you’ll incur a flat “Aviva share charge” of 0.4% on the value of these assets. This charge is capped at £120 a year for the Aviva SIPP.

You’ll also pay a £7.50 trading charge every time you trade in assets that fall into this category.

Finally, a “Fund manager charge” will apply for ETFs and investment trusts; this will be included in the cost of the investment.

Investment options with the Aviva pension

Aviva’s SIPP offers 5 ways to invest so you can choose the one that suits your needs best, whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned investor.

• Aviva’s Universal Retirement Fund. This is a form of “lifestyle” pension fund. Assets included in it tend to be higher risk, higher potential reward when you’re younger. The risk level reduces as you get closer to retirement and needing to withdraw your funds.
• Ready-made funds. You select the fund based on your risk appetite: lower, lower to medium, medium to higher, or higher. The higher the risk, the greater the chance of losses, but the greater the potential rewards.
• Fund shortlist. If Aviva’s ready made funds aren’t right for you, you can select one from a fund shortlist curated by its experts.
• Full fund list. Confident investors can peruse Aviva’s full fund list with over 5,000 options and make a selection of funds to build their pension portfolio.
• Pick investments. If you’re an experienced investor that knows what you’re doing and want full control over the assets held in your pension, you can include shares and other instruments – such as ETFs and investment trusts.

How can you manage the Aviva pension?

You can either set up regular monthly direct debit payments to Aviva, or make one-off transfers as and when you can afford it.

You can check your pension balance and performance, tweak your contribution levels and update your personal details by logging into your MyAviva online account. This can be done on your desktop or check how your pension is tracking on the MyAviva mobile app.

Transferring a pension to Aviva

If you want, you can transfer in money you already hold in any previous workplace or personal pension schemes. This can simplify your pension pots, and could result in lower pension costs. Always double check before going ahead with the transfer otherwise you could lose out on specific benefits or incur charges with your existing plan.

Aviva can help you decide if you’d like to transfer old pensions to it. In some cases, it might be best to leave your other pensions where they are – especially if the account has any special features or benefits that you’d lose in a transfer. These might include a guaranteed income from a defined benefit pension, a guaranteed annuity rate, or enhanced death benefits.

Is Aviva safe?

Aviva is regulated and authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), which means it’s as safe as any other regulated pension provider. And some may find reassurance in the fact that Aviva has been around for several centuries.

Aviva is also a member of the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS), which means deposits are protected up to a value of £85,000 if Aviva was to go bust.

Remember, though, neither FCA regulation or FSCS protection can safeguard any investment, including pensions, against market turbulence. Even lower-risk investments can lose money in a poor market.

Keeping your money invested for the long-term (as is usually the case with pensions) should help you ride out short-term volatility if you remain on track and committed to your strategy.

Aviva customer service and reviews

If you have any questions about your pension, or experience problems with your account, you can try its chatbot, send it an online enquiry, or call its pensions customer service line (from 8am to 6pm, Monday to Friday).

As a company, Aviva gets a solid if not sensational 4 out of 5 “excellent” score on customer review site Trustpilot (as of July 2024). However, it’s worth noting that the majority of these reviews are about insurance rather than pensions.

Filtering reviews by “pensions” as a keyword results in a mixed picture, with only a smattering of very positive reviews, and more 1 or 2 star ratings than Aviva would probably like. Unfortunately, some negative reviews are to do with investment performance but this is often outside of Aviva’s control and depends on overall market conditions.

To its credit, Aviva does take the time to respond to 90% of negative reviews.

Who is the Aviva pension suited to?

Aviva offers such a comprehensive pension product, this private pension could suit most types of retirement savers. You’ve plenty of options for types of investments to choose from so you should be able to find something that suits your long-term strategy.

The fees for using Aviva’s pension is reasonable and the fact that it can assist you with drawing from your pension later in life means that it could be a useful one-stop shop for your pension needs.
However, there are cheaper options out there, those that come with more nuanced investment choices, or providers that have better apps – so take some time to compare your pension options.

Frequently asked questions

• Who can open an Aviva SIPP?

  To pay into an Aviva SIPP, you have to be aged between 18 and 75. There’s no upper age limit to transfer pension pots to Aviva. You must also be resident in the UK, or have earnings from overseas Crown employment that is subject to UK tax.

• What are the contribution limits for an Aviva SIPP?

  Aviva only allows you to pay in contributions to its SIPP up to the level that qualifies for tax relief. Most people can benefit from pension tax relief on contributions up to the level of their annual earnings, or £60,000 (as of the 2024/5 tax year) if this is lower. This limit applies across all pensions you may hold.

• How do you open an Aviva SIPP?

  You’ll need to register with Aviva – it’s free and takes a few minutes. You’ll need:

  • Your national insurance (NI) number (get this from a payslip, your online tax account or dig out your old national insurance card if you received one)
  • Bank details or debit card information to make or set up payments.