Your contributions
Following the Company’s consultation with active members of the DB Section on its closure, Roche agreed to provide higher levels of support to members who joined the DC Section on 1 July 2023.
Each month, you and Roche will pay money into your pension account, and these contributions will be invested to help them grow over time. Before you joined the DC Section, you were given the option to choose how much to pay in. If you didn’t make a choice at that time, you would have been enrolled at the default contribution rate, as shown in the table below.
| Your contribution options | 5% | 4% | 3% (default) |
| Company’s contributions | 14% | 11.2% | 8.4% (default) |
| Total of your basic contribution salary | 19% | 15.2% | 11.4% (default) |
You can change your contribution rate, and pay in more than 5% if you wish. However, anything above 5% will be counted as additional voluntary contributions (AVCs), which won’t attract higher contributions from the Company.
Contributions are paid through salary sacrifice, which is a way of making them even more tax efficient.
If you would like to save more than 5% of your basic contribution salary towards your retirement, you can either pay additional voluntary contributions or, if you get an annual bonus, put some of that into your pension account.
Additional voluntary contributions (AVCs) are extra payments you make into your pension account as a way of boosting your retirement income. They work in exactly the same way as your main savings and are invested in the same funds.
Before you sign up to pay AVCs, check that you’re at the highest level of member contribution (5%) so that you also get the Company’s higher contributions. The Company won’t pay more than 14%, even if you pay more than 5%.
You can set up AVCs using My Total Roche, our benefits platform. You can do this during the annual flex enrolment window, when the option to pay AVCs will be automatically displayed. Alternatively, at other times of the year, you can contact Darwin, the team behind My Total Roche, to ask them to open up a window for you to set up or change your AVCs. Contact the Darwin Online Benefits helpline on 0203 435 7753 (8.30am - 6pm, Mon-Fri) or email helpdeskEMEA@darwin.com
Bonus Choice gives you the opportunity to sacrifice some or all of your Roche annual bonus for a Company contribution into your pension account. At retirement, you can use the money you’ve built up through Bonus Choice to provide you with a different retirement benefit to the one you’ve chosen for your main pension account.
If you’re eligible to participate in Bonus Choice, you’ll receive an email when the selection window opens, inviting you to log in to My Total Roche and make your choice. You will need to make your choice by the date specified in the annual Bonus Choice guide. If you receive another bonus in future years and wish to participate again, you will need to make a selection again at that time. (Please note, if you are on a full-time contract with Roche, you won’t be eligible for Bonus Choice even if you receive a bonus.)
The default investment option for your Bonus Choice contributions is different to the one used for your core DC contributions and AVCs. If you choose your own investments, you can select different investment funds for your Bonus Choice contributions.
You can find more details in your Bonus Choice guide, which is also available on My Total Roche.
While you were an active member of the DB Section, you also had the option to pay AVCs or participate in Bonus Choice. However, the money in these accounts will be held separate from your new DC Section account or Bonus Choice account. You can see all your accounts on the PlanViewer website.
You can change your contribution rate each year during the annual flex enrolment window through our benefits platform, My Total Roche.
Outside of the flex enrolment window, you can also request to change your contribution rate by contacting the Darwin Online Benefits helpline on 0203 435 7753 (8.30am - 6pm, Mon-Fri) or email helpdeskEMEA@darwin.com
You can’t change your contribution rate more than once a month.
Your contributions into the DC Section qualify for tax relief, which is the Government’s way of encouraging people to save more for their retirement.
So, if you pay tax at 20%, each £1 you pay into your pension actually only costs 80p in terms of take-home pay. The savings are even higher for people who pay tax at 40% or 45%.
You don’t have to do anything to get the tax relief – it’s handled automatically through the Company payroll.
Together with salary sacrifice savings and the Company’s contribution, this means that every £3.80 paid into your account may cost you as little as 68p in terms of your take-home pay (depending on the overall level of your income).
There is a limit on how much you can pay in and still get tax relief, called the annual allowance, but most people won’t have to worry about it.
This is a limit on the total pension contributions that can be paid by you, or on your behalf, into a pension scheme each year with tax relief. Contributions that count towards the annual allowance include all contributions paid into the Fund by either you or the Company and any contributions you make to any other pension arrangement (for example, if you have a private pension).
The standard annual allowance is £60,000 a year, but for some people it can be as low as £10,000 a year – if, for example, you earn more than £200,000 a year (from all sources, not just your salary) and are therefore affected by the ‘tapered annual allowance’, or if you’ve taken some of your retirement savings in a flexible way (triggering the ‘money purchase annual allowance’).
The rules around the annual allowance are complex, with the option in some cases to carry forward any unused allowance if you’ve used up too much in one year. If you go over the annual allowance, you’ll face a tax charge which will cancel out any tax relief you’ve received above the limit. You may be able to ask the Fund to pay this charge on your behalf, provided certain conditions are met – this is called ‘Scheme Pays’.
Please note: there are different deadlines for applying for Scheme Pays, depending on whether you exceeded the annual allowance while you were an active member of the DB Section, or as an active member of the DC Section.
You can find out more on the GOV.uk website. If you think the annual allowance may affect you, please seek impartial financial advice.
Your contributions (including AVCs and Bonus Choice payments) are paid through salary sacrifice. This is a way of paying contributions that reduces the National Insurance paid by both you and the Company.
The way it works is that you don’t make contributions directly to your pension account; instead you give up salary equal to the contribution amount you choose, and the Company pays this money into the Fund on your behalf. Your contributions are free of income tax and National Insurance (NI) contributions.
If you’ve had more than one job, you might have more than one pension. You might want to combine them (for example, if the ongoing charges in your old pension are much higher than in the Fund, or simply because you’d find it easier to keep track of just one pension pot).
With the Trustee’s consent, you can transfer other pensions into your DC Section pension account. You should always get professional advice before transferring a pension, especially if your old pension has special features that you’ll lose if you transfer (such as a right to take your pension early). You can find an adviser on the MoneyHelper website.
If you want to go ahead with a transfer, please contact Fidelity on 0800 3 68 68 68.