Monzo and Nest Body Launch Self-Employed Pension Savings Project

The scale of the problem is stark. Only 17% of self-employed people in the UK are actively saving into a pension, against nearly 90% of eligible employees covered by automatic enrolment. The gap persists despite three-quarters of self-employed workers saying they believe it is important to put money aside for retirement, a proportion broadly in line with their employed counterparts. The absence of any auto-enrolment equivalent for the self-employed, combined with irregular income patterns, means intention rarely translates into action.

The project’s intellectual foundation draws on seven years of research by the Centre for Inclusive Money at Nest (formerly Nest Insight), which has been investigating low pension participation among this group since 2019. Its most recent work found early evidence that opt-out “default savings” models, where money is set aside automatically unless the customer actively declines, could meaningfully shift behaviour without removing flexibility for those who cannot afford to save.

Monzo brings operational data to test that hypothesis at scale. More than two million customers enrolled in the bank’s automated Savings Challenge earlier this year, following £360 million saved collectively through the product in 2025. Monzo Business customers separately set aside £450 million through automated Tax Pots last year to cover self-assessment liabilities. Those figures suggest that removing friction and embedding defaults into the current account interface can produce material savings volumes, even among a customer base with variable cash flows.

Ruth Persian, associate director of research and innovation at the Centre for Inclusive Money at Nest, said the Monzo partnership represented a move from “promising ideas to real-world solutions for real customers.”

The Pensions Commission’s May 2026 interim report identified self-employed pension participation as “one of the most urgent challenges for the UK pensions system.” That framing carries weight: the original Pensions Commission, which reported in 2004 and 2005, directly shaped the auto-enrolment legislation that came into force in 2012. A second Commission reaching similar conclusions about the self-employed could prompt legislative or regulatory action, making the evidence Monzo and Nest generate commercially as well as socially significant.

Several adjacent efforts are already under way. The government has previously consulted on extending auto-enrolment to the self-employed via the tax system, using HMRC self-assessment data as a trigger. Technology-led models, of the kind this project is testing, offer an alternative route that does not require legislative change but does depend on the reach and trust of the banking relationship.

For Monzo, which holds full UK and European banking licences and serves more than 900,000 business customers, the project aligns product development with a clear policy direction. The near-term milestone is the design and launch of the customer initiative; the longer-term marker is whether the evidence is strong enough to inform the Commission’s 2027 report and, ultimately, a durable product that bridges the savings gap for sole traders.