There’s a particular kind of financial blind spot that comes with working in a creative field. Freelance illustrators, musicians between label deals, photographers stitching together commissions, writers juggling three publications at once, most of that world runs on invoices, not payslips.
Which means most of the usual conversations around workplace pensions simply never happen. No HR department signs you up automatically. No default fund gets chosen quietly on your behalf. The whole system assumes a version of employment that a huge number of creative careers don’t fit.
That’s worth sitting with for a second, because it cuts both ways.
The upside of falling outside the system
If you’ve never been auto-enrolled into a workplace pension, you’ve also never been on the receiving end of a decision someone else made for you without asking. Data comparing how UK workplace pension funds have actually performed shows exactly how much that decision matters for the people who are automatically enrolled.
Corporate Adviser compared 10 years of performance data across UK default pension funds, the funds most employed people get placed into without ever choosing one themselves. The spread was significant: the best-performing fund grew by 232% over the decade, the worst by just 88%.
Two people on identical salaries, contributing identical amounts for a decade, could end up with wildly different pension pots, purely because of which fund their employer happened to pick. If you’ve spent your career freelancing, that particular lottery never applied to you. But a different one might have: the lottery of never getting a pension started at all.
The gap nobody warns you about
Philip Smith, DC Director at TPT Retirement Solutions – one of the assessed providers that came third in the research – made an observation about the data that lands slightly differently once you take it outside the world of payslips and HR departments:
“For a long time, scale and low cost have carried a built-in assumption of safety. Big feels credible. Cheap feels efficient. Both are easy to defend. But member outcomes are what matter, and outcomes like these are a reminder that size and price do not, on their own, define value.”
For employed workers, the lesson is: don’t assume your default fund is a good one just because your employer picked a big or cheap-sounding provider. For freelancers and creatives, there’s a version of the same lesson one step earlier: don’t assume “I’ll sort a pension out eventually” is a neutral choice. It’s its own kind of default, one nobody’s tracking the performance of, because there’s nothing there to perform.
Building a pension when nobody’s building it for you
None of this means creative careers are incompatible with retirement planning, plenty of freelancers set up private pensions, and self-employed workers in the UK can access the same tax relief on contributions as anyone in a workplace scheme. It just means the responsibility sits entirely with you, at a time in life when a steady income and long-term saving can feel like they belong to a different career path altogether.
A few things worth knowing if you’ve never had this conversation:
- A private or self-employed pension isn’t complicated to open, most major providers let you start one online, and contributions still get the same tax relief as an employee’s would.
- You don’t need to commit to a huge monthly amount. Starting small and increasing contributions as income grows beats waiting for a “better time” that may never arrive.
- Performance varies wildly between providers, exactly as the CAPAdata research shows for workplace schemes. It’s worth comparing more than one option rather than picking whichever provider your bank happens to promote.
There’s also a broader debate happening in the pensions world about whether merging schemes into larger “megafunds” automatically makes them better for savers. The data above suggests size alone isn’t the guarantee it’s often assumed to be, and research from Australia’s Conexus Institute has reached a similar conclusion in a completely different market: both big and small funds can succeed, and it comes down to how well they’re run, not how big they are.
For anyone who’s spent years building a creative career outside the traditional employment structure, that’s a useful thing to know before choosing where your own retirement money goes. The absence of a default doesn’t have to mean the absence of a plan.
words Al Woods
