If you work as a freelance GP locum, your NHS pension does not look after itself. Salaried GPs have contributions deducted by the practice and partners are pensioned through the practice accounts, but a self-employed locum has to actively claim their own NHS accrual by completing Locum form A and Locum form B and paying the contributions over through the PCSE Solo route. Get the rhythm right and you build defined-benefit pension on every session. Miss the monthly deadline and that income usually cannot be pensioned at all, which is how locums quietly lose years of accrual.

This guide explains what Locum form A and Locum form B actually do, how they fit together with the PCSE Solo system, the deadlines that protect your accrual, how the contribution tiers work, and the mistakes that catch locums out. It is general information for UK GPs, not personal advice.

How GP Locums Fit into the NHS Pension Scheme

Doctors are members of the same NHS Pension Scheme whatever their working pattern. Since 1 April 2022 all active members, including locums, accrue in the 2015 section, a Career Average Revalued Earnings (CARE) scheme that builds pension at 1/54th of each year's pensionable earnings, revalued each year while active at CPI plus 1.5%. The older 1995 and 2008 sections are now legacy service with a final-salary link; you may have benefits there, but new accrual happens in the 2015 section.

The scheme records pensionable pay differently depending on the role, and the machinery is specific to general practice:

  • Type 1 medical practitioner (a GP provider or partner) is pensioned through the Annual Certificate of Pensionable Profits.
  • Type 2 medical practitioner (a salaried GP) completes a Type 2 self-assessment, submitted a year in arrears.
  • Freelance GP locum pensions each piece of work through Locum forms A and B, paid over via the PCSE Solo route.

The locum route is the only one without an end-of-year certificate or true-up. There is no annual safety net that sweeps up income you forgot to declare, which is exactly why the monthly forms matter so much. For a wider view of how locum income is taxed alongside your pension, see our locum doctor tax complete guide, and for the partner and salaried routes see GP partner vs salaried GP tax comparison.

What Is Locum Form A?

Locum form A is the per-session record. You complete a form A for the locum work you do, capturing the practice, primary care network or board you covered, the dates worked, and the pensionable pay for that work. The engaging practice signs to confirm the work was genuine NHS practitioner work (GMS, PMS or APMS), which is what makes it pensionable.

Think of form A as your evidence layer. Each form A is the proof that a specific block of NHS locum work happened and is eligible to be pensioned. You can complete several form A entries across a month for different practices or different sessions, and you keep them to support the monthly summary you submit on form B.

What counts as pensionable locum work

To pension locum income you need to be doing genuine NHS primary medical care work, be on the NHS England national Performers List and registered with the GMC. Pensionable locum work is paid against NHS general practice funding (the practice's Global Sum, Carr-Hill weighted funding, QOF, enhanced services and PCN or Network Contract DES income), not against private fees. Purely private sessions, expert-witness or medico-legal work and cosmetic clinic work are not NHS-pensionable, whatever form you complete.

What Is Locum Form B?

Locum form B is the monthly summary and payment return. It totals the pensionable pay from your form A entries for the month, applies your contribution tier, and is the document you submit, with payment, through the PCSE Solo system. Where form A is the per-session evidence, form B is the monthly return that actually moves the money into the scheme and books your accrual.

On form B you pay both your member contribution and the notional employer contribution over to PCSE. The employer element is reclaimed from the practices you locumed for, because the engaging practice is responsible for the employer cost. In practice you pay the full amount to PCSE through Solo and recover the employer slice from the practice, so it is worth agreeing that recovery up front when you take a booking.

Forms A and B go to PCSE (Primary Care Support England) through the online PCSE Solo portal, which is now the standard route in England (NHS England regions and Wales operate equivalent arrangements, so check your local route). One important boundary: the Locum A and B forms cover freelance GP locum work in general practice only. Sessions worked as a hospital locum are different, the hospital trust runs your pension and tax through its own payroll (PAYE and Class 1 National Insurance) where you are engaged as an employee, or through your engager under the off-payroll rules if you work via a company, so those shifts are not pensioned through forms A and B.

How Form A and Form B work together

The two forms are not an either/or choice, despite how the old "Form A vs Form B" framing is sometimes presented. You normally use both, every month you do pensionable locum work: a form A for each session as evidence, then a single form B that aggregates the month and pays the contributions over via PCSE Solo. Skip the form B and the form A entries never convert into actual pension.

The Deadline That Protects Your Accrual

This is the part that costs locums real money. PCSE applies a time limit for submitting your form B and paying contributions after the month the work was done. The published cut-off has changed over the years, so always confirm the current limit on the PCSE Solo guidance, but it runs to roughly a couple of months (broadly around 10 weeks) after the end of the month of the session.

If you miss the window, that period of locum income normally cannot be pensioned at all. Because locums have no annual certificate or self-assessment true-up (unlike Type 1 partners and Type 2 salaried GPs), there is usually no route to reopen a missed month later. The accrual is simply lost. The safe habit is to run form A continuously as you work and submit form B every single month, treating it as a standing payroll task rather than something to batch up at year end.

Locum Contribution Tiers (2025/26)

Member contributions are tiered by pensionable pay. For 2025/26 the member tiers run from 5.2% up to 12.5% of pensionable earnings, with higher earners in the higher tiers (the bands are reviewed periodically, so always confirm the current tier table on the NHSBSA website). On top of the member contribution you also pay the notional employer contribution through form B (recoverable from the engaging practice).

Two points trip locums up. First, your tier is set by your total NHS pensionable earnings, not by each assignment looked at separately, so if you locum across several practices the contributions must be calculated correctly across all of that work. Second, the contribution you pay is not the value of the pension you build: in a defined-benefit CARE scheme your benefit is the 1/54th accrual, not a pot equal to the contributions. That is what makes the NHS scheme valuable enough to be worth chasing the paperwork for.

Annual Allowance: the Tax Side of Locum Accrual

Building NHS pension as a locum has a tax dimension. The pension annual allowance is £60,000 (2025/26). It tapers where your threshold income exceeds £200,000 and your adjusted income exceeds £260,000, reducing by £1 for every £2 of adjusted income above £260,000 down to a minimum of £10,000. For a defined-benefit scheme the figure that is measured against the allowance is the pension input amount (the capitalised growth in your benefits), not the contributions you actually paid, so a locum with variable income can be surprised by a charge even when cash contributions look modest. Unused allowance can be carried forward from the previous three tax years.

The lifetime allowance was abolished from 6 April 2024 and replaced by the Lump Sum Allowance of £268,275 and the Lump Sum and Death Benefit Allowance of £1,073,100, so you no longer face a lifetime-allowance charge on the size of the fund itself.

For the detail of how the allowance works and how the taper bites, see our NHS pension annual allowance complete guide and the tapered annual allowance calculator. If an allowance charge does arise, the scheme can settle it for you, with the timing rules set out in our NHS pension Scheme Pays deadlines guide, and broader planning to reduce charges is covered in how to minimise NHS pension tax charges.

The Limited Company Trap for Locums

Some locums consider working through a limited company (a personal service company). Be clear about the pension consequence before you do: income routed through a company is not NHS-pensionable. A company cannot hold an NHS contract, and dividends drawn from a PSC build no NHS accrual whatsoever. So a locum who incorporates and pays themselves in dividends may save some tax but loses the very defined-benefit accrual that forms A and B exist to capture.

There is also an IR35 / off-payroll dimension. For NHS Trust work the hirer (or the agency as fee-payer) decides your status and may operate PAYE, and for medium or large private clients the hirer issues a Status Determination Statement. The off-payroll rules have not been abolished, so a PSC locum has to weigh status, tax and the pension loss together. We set out that comparison, including why the pension accrual loss often outweighs the tax saving, in locum doctor limited company pros and cons. If you keep working as a self-employed sole-trader locum, your income stays pensionable through forms A and B, which is usually the deciding factor.

Common Mistakes That Cost Locums Their Pension

  • Batching at year end. Leaving forms A and B until the tax year ends means missing the monthly deadline and losing months of accrual that cannot be recovered.
  • Forgetting the employer contribution. You pay both member and notional employer contributions over to PCSE, then recover the employer slice from the practice. Not agreeing this up front leaves you out of pocket.
  • Using the wrong tier. Calculating your contribution against one assignment rather than your total NHS pensionable pay across all practices puts you in the wrong tier.
  • Pensioning non-NHS work. Private, medico-legal or cosmetic sessions are not pensionable; only genuine NHS GMS, PMS or APMS work qualifies.
  • Incorporating without modelling the loss. Drawing locum income as dividends through a company removes it from the NHS scheme entirely.

Self-Assessment and MTD for Locums

As a self-employed locum you report your trading income on the self-employment pages (SA103) of your Self Assessment return, and your Class 4 National Insurance is now 6% on profits between £12,570 and £50,270 and 2% above (2025/26). Class 2 is no longer a required weekly payment from 6 April 2024 where profits are at or above the Small Profits Threshold. Most full-time locums earn above the £50,000 Making Tax Digital for Income Tax threshold that applies from 6 April 2026 (falling to £30,000 from April 2027 and £20,000 from April 2028), so will need to keep digital records and file quarterly updates. The pension contributions you pay through forms A and B are a separate stream from your tax return, but both need to be kept on top of.

Where Professional Support Helps

The locum pension forms are administrative rather than difficult, but the cost of getting them wrong is high because a missed month is usually gone for good. A specialist medical accountant can run the monthly form A and form B cycle alongside your bookkeeping and Self Assessment, make sure you are paying in the right contribution tier, recover the employer element from the practices you cover, and flag any annual-allowance exposure before it becomes a charge. As your locum income grows, joining up the pension paperwork with your wider tax planning is where most of the value sits.

If you are unsure how to set up your forms A and B, have realised you may have missed pensionable months, or are weighing up incorporation, our medical accounting team can help. Get in touch for a conversation about your situation.