Type 2 Pension Forms Explained: A Guide for Salaried and Sessional GPs

What the Type 2 form actually does

The Type 2 form — formally the Medical Practitioner Self-Assessment of Tiered Contributions — is not a tax form and it doesn't calculate your pension. It does one job: it reconciles the pension contributions actually deducted from you during the year against the contributions you should have paid, based on your total practitioner income across every NHS role you held.

Whether you are a Type 1, Type 2 or locum GP, it is your responsibility to pay the correct tier. Your contribution tier is based on your total income after adding all your pensionable practitioner roles together.

That last sentence is the whole point of the form. Your salaried practice deducts contributions based on what it pays you. It has no visibility of your out-of-hours work, your appraisal income, or your locum sessions. Only you can see the full picture, and the Type 2 form is where you declare it.

Who has to submit one

You are a Type 2 medical practitioner if you are:

• A salaried GP employed by a GP practice, APMS contractor or Local Health Board
• A long-term fee-based (surgery-based) GP
• A GP working solely on a self-employed basis for an out-of-hours provider

Where a salaried GP or career out-of-hours GP works in both England and Wales, they must complete two forms — one to PCSE, one to the LHB. Your tiered rate is based on your combined GP income across both countries, not on each separately.

If you had more than one Type 2 post, include all posts on the form and send a copy to each relevant PCSE team or LHB.

Who does not submit one

• GP partners and non-GP providers submit a Type 1 Annual Certificate of Pensionable Profits instead.
• Exclusive freelance locums. GP locums pension their income via forms A and B and are not required to complete an end-of-year certificate — but must still ensure the correct contribution tier has been paid. This is a widely misunderstood point, covered in detail in the locum guide.
• Officer-post holders. Salaried hospital work, VTS/registrar posts, and employed ICB roles are officer service, not practitioner service, and stay off the form.

The mid-year switch

If a GP switches from salaried to partner during a pension year (or vice versa), they must submit both a Type 2 self-assessment form and a Type 1 certificate, covering the salaried and partner periods respectively. Two forms, one year. This catches people out routinely.

What income goes on the form

Include all practitioner income:

• Salaried GP employment income
• GP SOLO income (out-of-hours, ICB work performed self-employed, some PCN roles)
• Pensioned freelance locum fees declared on Forms A and B
• Appraisal income
• Type 1 partnership profits, where you also held a partnership — any partnership income needs to be included as part of calculating the pension tier rate, with a separate Type 1 certificate completed

Exclude officer income. If you were a GP registrar, or formally employed by an ICB under a contract of employment, you were an officer in scheme terms. Your employer collects those contributions and updates your record directly, so that salary and those contributions must not be declared on the self-assessment form.

The distinction is the contract type, not the organisation. ICB work done on a contract for services (self-employed) goes on a GP SOLO form and is practitioner income for this purpose — and NHSBSA is explicit that the SOLO form must be used even if the ICB puts you on the payroll; the ICB must not create an officer post in that situation. ICB work under a contract of service (employment) is officer work and stays off.

Historically many commissioning bodies have handled this incorrectly, placing people as officers when they should have been practitioners and vice versa. If you're unsure, check whether a SOLO form was submitted for the work.

Note also that SOLO income is not annualised separately. Your actual ad hoc/SOLO income is added to your annualised practice income before the tier is set.

Annualisation — the part that goes wrong

This is where most Type 2 errors originate.

Your tier is set by your annualised pensionable pay, not your actual pay. If you did not hold continuous pensionable practitioner service across the whole scheme year, your income must be scaled up to a full-year equivalent to determine the tier percentage — and that percentage is then applied to your actual income.

The formula is: total GP pensionable income ÷ pensionable days of service × 365

NHSBSA's own example: a freelance GP locum earning £30,000 across 60 days of pensionable service annualises to £182,500, giving a tiered rate of 12.5% — so she pays £3,750 on her £30,000.

The effect is severe for anyone with a partial year. A GP returning from maternity leave in January, or starting a salaried post in November, can end up paying a top-tier percentage on a modest actual income. This is the design of the scheme, not an error — but it means you should never assume the deductions your practice made are correct.

The gap-length rule: breaks in practitioner service reduce your pensionable days regardless of length. All breaks, regardless of duration, affect the annualisation calculation. A GP who works consistently but with genuine gaps between engagements is in a materially different position from one on a continuous contract.

There is an Annualisation Calculator on the NHSBSA website which you will need to complete alongside the Type 2 form. Use it — the arithmetic is not intuitive and getting it wrong propagates into your record.

Authorised leave — and a retrospective refund worth checking

If you had authorised leave during the year — maternity, paternity, adoption, carers, neonatal, parental, parental bereavement or sick leave — complete the Authorised Leave tab.

The rule changed in March 2025, and the change is retrospective to 1 October 2022.

Where your pay was reduced during leave (half pay, for example), your tiered rate is now based on the actual pensionable pay you received, not on your unreduced salary. Your pension benefits are still calculated on the full "deemed pay" — you don't lose accrual.

NHSBSA's worked example: unreduced salary £70,000, six months at full pay then six months at half pay. Actual pay received is £52,500, so the tier is 10.7%. Under the old approach it would have been based on £70,000 and charged at 12.5%.

If you received reduced pay for any period between 1 October 2022 and 31 March 2024, you may be able to submit a revised Type 2 form and reclaim over-deducted contributions. Anyone who took maternity or extended sick leave in that window should check this.

The mechanics to remember:

• Employee contributions = tier rate × actual earnings
• Employer contributions = 14.38% × employer pay (actual plus deemed)
• Added years, Additional Pension and ERRBO = contract % × employer pay

So your own contributions follow actual pay, but your additional-purchase contributions stay on the unreduced figure. Ask the practice for a copy of the Maternity Breakdown form to confirm employer contributions were paid correctly.

Unpaid leave

Certain unpaid leave still allows pension accrual: adoption, carers', maternity, neonatal care, parental bereavement, parental, paternity, and shared parental leave. Carers' leave was added 1 April 2024; neonatal care leave from 6 April 2025. Unpaid leave due to illness or injury is not eligible. Where accrual continues, you pay contributions at the same level as immediately before going to zero pay.

Deadlines

The form runs a year in arrears. Type 2 forms are always submitted a year in arrears — work done in the 2024/25 financial year (1 April 2024 to 31 March 2025) is submitted by the deadline of 28 February 2026.

Applying the same pattern: the 2026/27 Type 2 self-assessment form must be submitted to PCSE or the LHB by 28 February 2028.

NHSBSA's formal position is that the form goes to your employing authority by the end of February for the previous scheme year.

Deadlines have occasionally been extended — the 2022/23 deadline moved from 28 February 2024 to 31 March 2024 — but this is not something to plan around.

How to submit

Forms should be submitted to PCSE via the Contact Us page, completing a new GP Pensions enquiry. They can also be completed and sent by post to Primary Care Support England, PO Box 350, Darlington, DL1 9QN.

The submission route has been unstable in recent years. For 2023/24, substantial changes to the forms meant it was not possible to incorporate them into PCSE Online, and members had to submit via PCSE Contact Us instead. The BMA recorded its disappointment that the self-service function was unavailable that year. NHSBSA, NHS England and PCSE subsequently worked on a plan to ensure the 2024/25 forms would be available on PCSE Online in good time for the 2026 deadline.

Check the current route each year rather than assuming. Download the correct year's form and guidance from the NHSBSA Member Hub — the forms are reissued annually and versions are not interchangeable.

You will receive a case reference when PCSE has received your form, and PCSE will contact you when it has been successfully reconciled or if further information is needed. Keep that reference.

What happens after submission

Once PCSE has processed the form, the relevant details pass to NHS Pensions, who update your Total Reward Statement. There are two TRS updates each year, in August and December.

Your Annual Benefit Statement is updated each year provided you have submitted the relevant certificate for all previous years and these have been successfully reconciled by PCSE.

That conditional is important: one missing year blocks everything after it. A GP who skipped 2021/22 will find their ABS frozen regardless of how diligently they file subsequently. NHSBSA can only produce an Annual Benefit Statement if it holds all the relevant information, for the year in question and previous years.

If a Type 2 doctor does not submit the form, their pension record is not brought up to date, and contribution payments made are not allocated to their pension until the form is submitted.

The stronger sanction is worth stating plainly: failure to comply with the NHS Pension Scheme Regulations may result in your pensionable pay being provisionally set to zero for the relevant period. That is not a delay — it is a year of your career showing no pensionable earnings until you fix it.

Reconciling before you file

When completing the form, obtain your Employee Contribution Statement for the year from PCSE Online to check PCSE's record of contributions paid. You can use this to check that SOLO and locum contributions agree back to your monthly pension forms. You can also see contributions collected through the GP practice on your behalf — note this may not match the deductions showing on your payslips.

That final point deserves emphasis. Your payslip shows what your practice deducted. The Employee Contribution Statement shows what PCSE received. These diverge more often than they should, and the Type 2 form is where the divergence surfaces.

If the form shows an underpayment or overpayment

The form colour-codes the result: red means you owe arrears, green means you overpaid.

Arrears must be paid immediately on submitting the form — and critically, you must not pay the arrears through one source. Each stream goes back where it came from:

Overpayments reverse the same routes. If the practice set the rate too high you recover through the practice, who liaise with PCSE. If you overpaid on locum income, PCSE/LHB pay you directly by cheque or BACS.

Arrears on a salaried post are collected via the practice even if you have since left. If an organisation no longer exists, contact NHSBSA for advice — that's the one case where the single-source prohibition gives way.

Where an underpayment arose because your practice deducted at the wrong tier, the mechanics get awkward: the liability is yours, but the error may not be. Raise it with your employer early rather than absorbing it silently.

Added years, Additional Pension and ERRBO

If you hold any of these, the form checks them too:

• Additional Pension — paid as a monetary amount through one pensionable post only. Goes in box 7.
• Added years — paid as a percentage of your pay in every post. Boxes 8 to 8c.
• ERRBO — goes in box 7. If your agreement completed mid-year, an apportioned percentage to the contract end date should be calculated. If you terminated or suspended during the year, contributions for the relevant part year should have been returned.

Do not include NHS money purchase AVCs (Prudential, Standard Life, Utmost) or any freestanding AVCs — those are separate schemes.

The pre-2008 earnings cap. If you were subject to the old pensionable earnings cap and are buying added years under an agreement that started before 1 April 2008, those added years remain capped. The capped figure was £223,800 for 2024/25 and £230,400 for 2025/26. Agreements starting on or after 1 April 2008 are uncapped.

Practical takeaways

1. The form exists because nobody else can see your full income. Your practice only knows what it pays you.
2. Annualise properly. Use the NHSBSA calculator. Partial years produce counterintuitive tiers.
3. Reduced pay during authorised leave now sets your tier on actual pay — and that's retrospective to 1 October 2022. Check whether you're owed a refund.
4. Officer income stays off. The test is contract of service (officer) vs contract for services (practitioner).
5. File every year, in order. One gap freezes your Annual Benefit Statement — and non-compliance can set your pensionable pay to zero.
6. Reconcile against the Employee Contribution Statement, not your payslips.
7. Pay arrears back to each source separately. Settling everything through the practice is not permitted.
8. Switched status mid-year? Two forms. Worked in England and Wales? Also two forms, with the tier set on combined income.

Sources

Verified against the NHSBSA GP Member Pension Guide V5 (23 April 2026) and the 2024/25 Type 2 self-assessment guidance V1 (25 September 2025).

Worth checking each year, as forms and deadlines are reissued:

• NHSBSA Member Hub for the current year's form and guidance
• NHSBSA annualising calculator and GP Tiered Contributions Guide
• PCSE end-of-year submission route (has changed year to year)

A note on advice

This article is general information, not personal financial advice. Consider a specialist medical accountant before acting.