A sharp fall, but on a shrinking sample
The uphold rate for pension transfer advice complaints decided by the Financial Ombudsman has fallen from 43.4% to 27.8% between the prior 90-day window and the most recent one, according to Veste's analysis of published decisions. That is a drop of 15.6 percentage points. Over the same two windows, the number of decisions issued fell from 113 to 88, a decline of 25 decisions, or 22.1%.
Both windows meet Veste's minimum sample threshold of 30 decisions, so the comparison is not being drawn from a handful of cases. But 88 decisions is still a modest base for a category that has produced 7,593 published outcomes since 2013, and the monthly figures beneath the headline number show why some caution is warranted before reading too much into a single quarter.
The numbers behind the movement
Across the full history captured by Veste, pension transfer advice complaints have produced 7,593 decisions, of which 3,860 were upheld, 439 partially upheld and 3,294 not upheld, giving an overall uphold rate of 53.7%. The first decision in this dataset was published on 9 April 2013 and the most recent on 11 June 2026.
That long-run rate of 53.7% sits well above the uphold rate across the whole Financial Ombudsman corpus that Veste tracks, which stands at 28.8% across 401,663 decisions with an outcome. Pension transfer advice, in other words, has historically been upheld far more often than the average published complaint, even as the rate has been falling in recent years.
The monthly series, running from June 2024 to June 2026 (25 months of data), illustrates how variable the rate has been even before the latest 90-day comparison. In June 2024 the monthly uphold rate stood at 55.6% on 36 decisions. By September 2024 it had fallen to 40.3% on 67 decisions, the largest monthly volume in the series. It then drifted through the low 30s and high 40s for much of 2025: 36.2% in January 2025, 47% in May 2025, 39.8% in July 2025, 32.1% in September 2025. There was a brief spike back to 56.8% in January 2026 on 37 decisions, before falling again to 34.3% in February, 28.3% in March, 41.7% in April, 25% in May and 29.2% in the twelve decisions recorded so far for June 2026.
That pattern of an occasional single month bouncing well above or below the surrounding months, on volumes as low as 12 or 20 decisions, is a useful reminder that this is a category where monthly and even quarterly rates can move a long way without necessarily reflecting a change in how firms or the Ombudsman are approaching cases.
The longer-term trend
Seen against the year-on-year figures, the recent fall looks less like an isolated event and more like the continuation of a multi-year decline. The uphold rate for pension transfer advice was 72.8% in 2023, on 1,402 decisions, the highest annual rate and volume in the series supplied. It fell to 53.8% in 2022 on 1,029 decisions (2022 sits below 2023 in the sequence Veste analysed), then to 50.1% in 2024 on 732 decisions, to 40.7% in 2025 on 594 decisions, and to 36.7% so far in 2026 on 181 decisions.
Each of those annual figures meets Veste's minimum sample threshold, so the year-on-year comparison is reasonably robust even though the number of decisions has fallen substantially: from 1,402 in 2023 to 181 in the year to date in 2026. Both the uphold rate and the volume of decisions have been declining broadly in step for three consecutive years. The latest 90-day figures are consistent with, rather than a sharp break from, that longer pattern, though the size of the single-quarter fall (15.6 percentage points) is larger than the year-on-year moves and should be treated as an early, noisy data point for 2026 rather than a confirmed feature of the year.
What the firm-level data shows
Veste's data groups decisions by the business name recorded on each individual decision. This means subsidiaries of the same banking or insurance group appear as separate entries and are not combined into a single parent figure, so comparisons between similarly named firms should be read with that in mind.
Among firms with enough decisions to meet Veste's minimum sample of 30, the range of uphold rates for pension transfer advice is wide. Options UK Personal Pensions LLP recorded an uphold rate of 100% across 248 decisions, all of them upheld. Portal Financial Services LLP recorded an uphold rate of 92.8% across 188 decisions, with 173 upheld, 3 partially upheld and 12 not upheld.
At the other end of the range, The Royal London Mutual Insurance Society Limited recorded an uphold rate of 19.8% across 167 decisions, Phoenix Life Limited 21.8% across 202 decisions, and The Prudential Assurance Company Limited 21.9% across 344 decisions, the largest single-firm volume in the supplied data. Aviva Life & Pensions UK Limited recorded 34.1% across 343 decisions, ReAssure Limited 28.9% across 194 decisions, Scottish Widows Limited 23.8% across 141 decisions, Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada (U.K.) Limited 43.5% across 139 decisions, and Zurich Assurance Ltd 39.5% across 133 decisions.
This spread, from firms upheld in every published case to firms upheld in fewer than a quarter, reflects differences in the specific advice being challenged, the type of scheme involved and the circumstances of individual complainants, as much as it may reflect anything about firm conduct generally. Veste's data describes published Ombudsman decisions rather than the full population of complaints made to any firm, and a high or low uphold rate in this category does not itself establish a pattern of wrongdoing.
What appears to be driving the fall, and what remains unclear
The supplied data allows us to observe that the uphold rate has fallen and that decision volume has fallen at the same time, across both the 90-day comparison and the longer year-on-year series. It does not tell us why. There is no data here on the specific mix of firms, advice types or complaint reasons contributing to the most recent 90-day window compared with the prior one, so any explanation of the fall in terms of case mix would be speculation beyond what has been supplied.
What can be said is that pension transfer advice, even after several years of falling uphold rates, remains a category where published outcomes are decided in the complainant's favour more often than the average across the whole Ombudsman corpus (53.7% against a corpus-wide baseline of 28.8%), and this remains true even at the reduced 27.8% rate recorded in the latest 90-day window, which is still below that overall category average but not obviously out of line with the range of monthly rates seen over the past two years, several of which dipped into the low 30s or high 20s.
Individual cases as illustration
Four decisions published in the days immediately before this analysis show the range of outcomes still being reached in this category. On 11 June 2026, a complaint against Quilter Financial Limited concerning a Section 32 pension transfer, involving a guaranteed minimum pension of £10,200 a year from age 65 and a £25,000 tax-free lump sum used to repay debts, was not upheld; the Ombudsman found the complainant had sufficient other guaranteed pension income, over £31,000 a year in total, to meet retirement needs without relying on the transferred benefits.
On 10 June 2026, a complaint against WPS Advisory Ltd concerning defined benefit transfer advice and an alleged failure to warn about falling cash equivalent transfer values, which fell in that case from £1,053,000 to £433,450, was not upheld; the Ombudsman found the firm had not given the categorical assurances the complainant alleged.
On the same date, two separate complaints against True Potential Wealth Management LLP, both concerning pension transfers recommended by the same category of adviser relationship, were upheld. In one, the Ombudsman found the adviser had predetermined the transfer recommendation before properly assessing the complainant's circumstances, and that the complainant had no genuine need to transfer given an adequate existing pension and a recent addition to it. In the other, the firm's registration of a client without evidence of consent, and the absence of any material benefit to the transfer, led to the same conclusion.
These four decisions, three not upheld and one upheld set alongside another upheld outcome against the same firm, cannot be read as evidence of a broader trend for any of the named businesses. They illustrate the kind of case-specific reasoning, around guaranteed income adequacy, the presence or absence of a genuine need to transfer, and whether an adviser followed a firm's own documented process, that continues to determine individual outcomes in this category.
What the data does not show
The figures in this analysis describe published Financial Ombudsman decisions only. They are not the same as the total number of complaints made to any firm about pension transfer advice, many of which will be resolved before reaching a published decision or may not meet the Ombudsman's criteria for publication. A firm with a low uphold rate in this dataset has not been shown to have poor practices generally, and a firm with a 100% uphold rate on a modest published sample, such as Options UK Personal Pensions LLP's 248 decisions, has not been shown to have systemic failings either. The data indicates only what was decided in the specific cases that reached publication.
The implication
The 15.6 percentage point fall between the two most recent 90-day windows is real in the data supplied, but it sits within a pattern of monthly volatility that has been visible for at least two years, against a backdrop of a genuine multi-year decline in both the volume and the uphold rate of pension transfer advice decisions since 2023. Anyone using this category's headline rate to judge current advice standards should look at the trend across several quarters rather than a single 90-day window, and should bear in mind that as decision volumes continue to fall, each individual quarter's rate will remain more sensitive to a small number of case outcomes.