A sharp fall, but part of a longer slide
In the most recent 90-day window tracked by Veste, the uphold rate for pension-related Financial Ombudsman decisions stood at 32.9%, down from 44.1% in the prior 90-day window. That is a fall of 11.2 percentage points. Over the same comparison, the number of decisions rose from 262 to 290, an increase of 28 decisions, or 10.7%. Both windows meet Veste's minimum sample threshold of 30 decisions, so this is not a case of a handful of rulings swinging a tiny sample. But an 11.2-point swing in three months is still a substantial move, and the monthly trend and year-on-year figures suggest it fits a pattern rather than standing apart from one.
The uphold rate definition used throughout is (upheld plus half of partially upheld) divided by total decisions, the same measure Veste applies across all products and firms.
The headline numbers
Across the full period Veste holds pension decisions for, dating back to first sight on 2013-04-08 and running to 2026-06-04, there have been 15,554 decisions. Of these, 6,595 were upheld, 1,338 partially upheld and 7,621 not upheld, giving an all-time uphold rate of 46.7% for the product category. That sits well above the corpus-wide baseline uphold rate of 28.8% across all 400,758 decisions in Veste's database, indicating pension complaints have historically been upheld more often than the average Financial Ombudsman case, though the gap has narrowed sharply in the most recent data, as set out below.
What the monthly series shows
Veste's monthly trend for pension decisions covers 25 months, from 2024-06-01 to 2026-06-01. The uphold rate has not moved in a straight line, but the direction over that period is downward. In June 2024 it stood at 52.3%, with 107 decisions that month. By May 2026, the most recently completed full month in the series, it had fallen to 28.8%, from 92 decisions. The final data point, June 2026, shows an uphold rate of 17.9%, but this is drawn from only 14 decisions and should be treated as an early, incomplete read on a month still being published rather than a settled figure.
Between those endpoints the series fluctuates month to month, sometimes sharply. March 2025 saw a rate of 51.4% on 179 decisions, one of the higher-volume months in the series, while the following month, April 2025, dropped to 37.4% on 95 decisions. September 2025 fell to 36.2%, then October 2025 was similar at 37.5%. The pattern from late 2025 into 2026 is consistently in the high 30s to high 20s, a noticeably lower band than mid-2024.
The year-on-year picture
Veste's year-on-year figures, which meet minimum sample size in every year shown, reinforce the monthly trend. In 2023, pension decisions were upheld at a rate of 60.9% across 2,368 decisions, the highest of the five years recorded. That fell to 50.5% in 2024 across 1,567 decisions, then to 43.8% in 2025 across 1,394 decisions. So far in 2026, with 473 decisions recorded, the rate stands at 38.8%. The year 2022 sits apart from this steady decline, at 46.6% across 1,776 decisions, close to the 2024 figure but below 2023.
Taken together, the year-on-year series shows uphold rates falling in each of the last three complete years: 2023 to 2024, and 2024 to 2025, with 2026 continuing that trajectory on a partial year. The latest 90-day fall of 11.2 percentage points therefore looks less like an isolated shock and more like the sharper end of a trend that has been building since 2023.
Firm mix and what may be contributing
Veste's data does not break the 90-day window down by firm, so it is not possible to say precisely which businesses drove the recent fall. But the top firms table, covering decisions across the full period, shows wide variation in uphold rates between firms handling pension complaints, all of which meet the minimum sample size.
Aviva Life & Pensions UK Limited has the highest volume in the table, with 1,042 decisions and an uphold rate of 32.4%. The Prudential Assurance Company Limited follows with 847 decisions at 21.8%, and Scottish Widows Limited with 563 decisions at 22.3%. ReAssure Limited, with 513 decisions, has a notably higher rate of 38.8%. Phoenix Life Limited sits at 23.7% across 479 decisions, and Scottish Equitable Plc at 30.2% across 407 decisions.
One firm stands well outside this range: Options UK Personal Pensions LLP, with 468 decisions and an uphold rate of 99.7%, comprising 466 upheld decisions against just one not upheld and one partial. This is an extreme outlier against every other firm in the table and warrants a word of caution rather than immediate inference. Veste's data does not indicate the reason for a firm-level rate this concentrated, and readers should note that Veste counts firms by the exact business name recorded on each decision, meaning subsidiaries of the same banking or insurance group are not combined. A firm's published uphold rate reflects that specific legal entity's published decisions only, not necessarily its wider complaint handling.
At the other end, Standard Life Assurance Limited shows the lowest rate among the top ten, at 15.9% across 273 decisions. St. James's Place Wealth Management Plc, which appears in one of the illustrative examples below, has an uphold rate of 27.2% across 259 decisions.
Because none of this firm-level data is time-stamped to the recent 90-day window specifically, it cannot be used to explain the latest fall directly. What it does show is that the pension category contains firms with structurally different uphold rates, so any change in the mix of which firms are generating published decisions in a given quarter could itself move the category-wide rate, independent of any change in decision-making standards at individual firms.
Related complaint types
Pension decisions sit within a wider set of complaint categories that Veste tracks. Pension transfer advice, the largest related category with 7,491 decisions, has an uphold rate of 54%, higher than the pension category's own historical average. Investment mis-selling, with 2,871 decisions, sits at 50.2%. Account administration errors, at 1,516 decisions, run lower at 37.6%, and general financial advice, at 1,296 decisions, lower still at 35.8%. These figures suggest that within the broad pension and related-advice space, complaints specifically about transfer advice and mis-selling have tended to succeed more often than complaints about administration or general advice, though Veste's data does not allow further breakdown of the recent pension-specific fall against these categories.
Individual decisions as illustration
Veste's four most recent example decisions, all dated 2026-06-03 or 2026-06-04, illustrate the range of issues reaching the Ombudsman rather than proving any trend. One, against St. James's Place Wealth Management Plc, was upheld: the Ombudsman found the firm had failed to provide annual reviews it was contracted to deliver in 2017 and 2018, and ordered compensation calculated from undeducted ongoing advice charges. A second, against Scottish Widows Limited trading as Clerical Medical, was not upheld, with the Ombudsman finding the firm had correctly reported a pension withdrawal to HMRC and that tax reconciliation was HMRC's responsibility rather than the firm's. A third, against ART Holdings Limited trading as MFS Independent Financial Advisers, was not upheld; the Ombudsman found the firm's advice to defer a defined benefit transfer had been suitable given the complainant's circumstances at the time, rejecting arguments based on hindsight about later market movements. A fourth, against Aviva Life & Pensions UK Limited, was partially upheld, with £200 awarded for distress over misleading information on transfer timescales, though a further claim for financial loss was rejected because the complainant could not have controlled the exact transfer timing regardless.
These four decisions cannot be taken as representative of the category as a whole, given the much larger sample sizes discussed above, but they show the kind of issues, timescale disputes, advice suitability, tax reporting and service failures, that make up published pension decisions.
What the data does and does not show
The data shows a clear downward movement in the pension uphold rate across the last 90 days, across the last several calendar years, and across the monthly series since mid-2024. It does not show why. Veste's dataset does not capture Ombudsman staffing, case allocation, regulatory guidance changes, or shifts in which types of pension complaint are being brought forward, all factors that could plausibly influence a category-wide uphold rate over time. Nor does it allow the recent 90-day fall to be attributed to any specific firm, since firm-level data in this dataset is not broken down by the recent window.
It is also worth restating that published Ombudsman decisions are not the same population as all complaints made to a firm. Many complaints are resolved before reaching a published decision, and the mix of cases that proceed to a formal Ombudsman ruling may not reflect the broader complaint population at any given firm or across the pension market.
The practical implication
For firms and advisers operating in the pension space, the consistent year-on-year decline in uphold rates, from 60.9% in 2023 to 38.8% so far in 2026, is the more durable signal here than the latest quarter's sharper fall. A single 90-day window, even one meeting minimum sample thresholds, is more exposed to short-term composition effects, such as which firms happen to generate published decisions in that period. The multi-year trend, covering thousands of decisions each year, is harder to dismiss as noise. Anyone tracking pension complaint outcomes should watch whether the next full quarter's data continues the recent trajectory or reverts closer to the higher rates seen in 2023 and 2024, before treating the latest fall as a settled shift rather than a further data point in an already declining series.