Best SIPP providers 2026: where to hold your pension

A SIPP is the account where the fee argument stops being theoretical. My ISA took years to reach a balance where a tenth of a percent mattered. My pension, once two old workplace pots were added to it, got there in an afternoon.

The whole comparison reduces to one piece of arithmetic. Take a flat monthly fee, annualise it, and divide by the percentage rate a rival charges. That is the balance at which the two cost the same, and the answer is lower than most people expect.

Interactive investor's Core plan is £5.99 a month, which is £71.88 a year. AJ Bell charges 0.25% a year on funds. £71.88 divided by 0.0025 is £28,752. Hold funds worth more than that and the flat fee is the cheaper structure, by an amount that grows every year you keep contributing. Against the 0.35% that Hargreaves Lansdown and Fidelity charge, the crossover falls to £20,537.

Those are small numbers for a pension. Someone in their forties who has consolidated one old employer scheme is usually already past both. Someone starting a SIPP from nothing this year is not, and paying £71.88 to hold £8,000 would be a poor trade. The structure that wins depends on the balance you will actually hold over the next decade, not the one you hold today.

There is a third structure that breaks the arithmetic entirely. InvestEngine charges no platform fee on its DIY SIPP, and Freetrade includes a SIPP on its free Basic plan. Zero divided by anything has no crossover point. Both buy that with a narrower proposition, which the rest of this page gets into.

Every figure below comes from the provider's own charges page, checked in July 2026. Ordered cheapest structure first at a mid-sized balance.

Annual platform charge only, on a portfolio of funds, before any dealing costs and before the ongoing charges of whatever you hold. Funds rather than ETFs, because that is where the percentage platforms apply no cap and the difference gets ugly.

Change the table above from funds to ETFs and the ranking rearranges itself, because three of the percentage platforms cap what they charge on exchange-traded holdings and none of them caps what they charge on funds.

Fidelity caps the service fee on shares, ETFs and investment trusts at £7.50 a month, so £90 a year. Divide £90 by 0.0035 and the cap binds at £25,714. Above that, a Fidelity ETF portfolio costs £90 a year whether it holds £30,000 or £3 million. AJ Bell's share cap is £10 a month, £120 a year, reached at £48,000. Hargreaves Lansdown caps shares, ETFs, investment trusts and bonds at £12.50 a month, £150 a year, reached at £42,857.

That flips the £500,000 row completely. A fund investor pays Hargreaves Lansdown £1,500 a year. An ETF investor with the same balance at the same platform pays £150. The platform did not get cheaper. The wrapper contents did.

It also puts Fidelity ahead of interactive investor for large ETF-only pensions, which is not a sentence I expected to write. £90 against £179.88, with no portfolio limit forcing a plan upgrade. Below £100,000 the ii Core plan at £71.88 is cheaper than Fidelity's £90 cap, so the two swap places depending on where you sit.

Underneath both, InvestEngine charges nothing on the DIY SIPP and no dealing commission, leaving only the ETF ongoing charges, which it says start from 0.03% a year. That is the cheapest platform arrangement here by a distance. You pay for it in scope: the account is built around ETFs, and if you want individual shares, active funds or investment trusts it is the wrong tool.

Dealing charges get more attention than they deserve on a pension. If you buy twelve times a year on a monthly schedule, AJ Bell, Fidelity and Hargreaves Lansdown all charge nothing for regular investing by direct debit, and interactive investor lists regular investing as free too. The one-off rates only matter if you trade, and a pension is not usually where people trade.

Drawdown charges deserve far more attention than they get, and almost no comparison table carries them. Three of these providers publish nothing for it. Hargreaves Lansdown says it is free to set up drawdown and free to adjust the income. Fidelity's schedule lists no charge for annual administration of a capped or flexible drawdown account, no charge for transferring out to a UK or overseas scheme, and no exit fee. AJ Bell says it does not charge a withdrawal fee once a pension is in drawdown and does not charge exit fees. Vanguard states plainly that it charges no extra fees when you start taking money.

Freetrade is the outlier, and it is a large one. Its SIPP charges schedule says drawdown is not offered at all, and that each uncrystallised funds pension lump sum withdrawal costs £240, deducted from the pension fund. If you want an income rather than occasional lump sums you have to transfer the whole pot elsewhere first. Freetrade does not charge for that transfer out, but it means the free Basic plan is an accumulation account rather than a retirement account, and the £240 arrives at precisely the point in life when you are least placed to shrug at it.

A £240 withdrawal fee dwarfs every dealing charge in this article. Someone taking four lump sums a year would pay £960, against £6.95 a trade at Hargreaves Lansdown. Weight the two accordingly.

A SIPP operates relief at source. You pay in from taxed income, the provider reclaims basic rate relief from HMRC and adds it to the pot, so £80 becomes £100. That is different from the net pay arrangement most workplace schemes use, where the contribution comes out before income tax is calculated and no reclaim happens because there is nothing to reclaim.

The part people miss is that relief at source only ever adds the basic rate. Higher and additional rate taxpayers have to claim the rest themselves through Self Assessment, and gov.uk sets out a further 20% on income taxed at 40% and 25% on income taxed at 45% in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Nobody sends a reminder. Money left unclaimed stays unclaimed.

Relief applies to contributions worth up to 100% of your annual earnings, or £2,880 net in a year with no earnings. The annual allowance is £60,000. It tapers where threshold income exceeds £200,000 and adjusted income exceeds £260,000, down to a floor of £10,000, and the money purchase annual allowance of £10,000 applies once you have flexibly accessed a defined contribution pension. Those four figures are the current ones on HMRC's rates page and they move, so check them rather than trusting a number you read last year.

The money purchase annual allowance is the one that catches people out. Taking a flexible lump sum in your late fifties while still working can drop the amount you can contribute from £60,000 to £10,000, permanently.

Consolidation is the reason most people open a SIPP in their forties. Four employers, four pots, four sets of login details and no idea what any of them is invested in. Pulling them into one account makes the fee arithmetic above work harder, because a single larger balance reaches the tiers and caps faster than four small ones.

Two warnings before anyone starts, and they are not the same warning.

The first has already appeared at the top of this page and is worth repeating in full. A defined benefit or final salary pension is not something to move on the basis of a fee table. Where safeguarded benefits exceed £30,000, advice from an FCA-authorised adviser with pension transfer permission is a legal requirement before the transfer can proceed, the receiving scheme has to verify that the advice was taken, and the FCA's published starting point is that most such transfers are not in the consumer's interest. Nothing on this page changes that.

The second is quieter and catches more people. Old defined contribution policies, particularly ones sold in the eighties and nineties, can carry safeguarded benefits of their own. Guaranteed annuity rates are the common one. HMRC's guidance describes a GAR as a right to convert your fund into an income at a rate fixed during the accumulation phase, and notes it remains a safeguarded benefit even where the guaranteed rate currently looks worse than the open market, because open market rates can fall. Some older schemes also carry a protected pension age, which lets the holder draw benefits before the normal minimum age. A transfer can extinguish either of them.

The practical step is dull and works: write to each existing provider and ask, in those words, whether the policy carries guaranteed annuity rates, a protected pension age, any other safeguarded benefit, or an exit penalty. Get the answer in writing before you start a transfer, not after. AJ Bell says it will cover exit fees charged by a losing provider up to £500 where the account being moved is worth £20,000 or more, which softens that particular blow but does not restore a guarantee you have signed away.

Transfers themselves are slow. Cash transfers are quicker than in-specie ones and mean time out of the market. Neither is a fee, but both are a cost.

Everything above is verifiable. The things that decide whether you are happy with a pension provider over twenty years mostly are not.

Transfer times are the first. A pension transfer runs on the losing provider's timetable, not the receiving one's, and the receiving platform's real job is chasing. Some do it. Some hand you a reference number and a shrug. No charges page discloses which kind you have chosen until you are six weeks into finding out.

Phone support is the second, and it stops being a nice-to-have the moment something goes wrong with a pension rather than an ISA. Drawdown paperwork, a contribution that lands in the wrong tax year, a death benefit nomination. These are not chat-window problems. A provider with a published UK phone number and staff who understand pension tax rules is worth real money at that point, and the flat-fee and zero-fee platforms are not uniformly strong here.

App quality matters least of all on a pension and is what most reviews lead with. You will look at this account a handful of times a year. An interface that makes contributions and tax relief legible is genuinely useful. An interface optimised for frequent trading is close to irrelevant, and on a pension arguably counterproductive.

Then there is what the platform pays on uninvested cash. InvestEngine's own costs page is upfront that it retains the interest earned on cash sitting in accounts. On a pension holding a few thousand in cash between contributions, that is a real cost even though it never appears as a charge. A zero fee is not always a zero cost.

UK platforms offering a SIPP have to be authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority, and the firm number is published in each one's own legal notice. The ones I pulled directly: Hargreaves Lansdown Asset Management is 115248, Fidelity's Financial Administration Services Limited is 122169, InvestEngine (UK) Limited is 801128 and Freetrade Limited is 783189. Rather than take my word for the rest, check any firm, and any adviser, on the FCA Register, and it is worth doing before you send anyone a pension.

The FSCS can pay up to £85,000 per eligible person per firm where a SIPP operator fails. What it does not do is compensate you for investments that fall in value. That distinction gets blurred constantly and it matters: the £85,000 answers the question of what happens if the platform collapses, not the question of what happens if markets do.

For how KindredBase checks and scores platforms, see our review methodology and how we verify offers.

The sum I keep coming back to is the crossover. Flat annual fee, divided by the percentage rate a rival charges. Run it against the balance you expect to hold in ten years rather than the one on screen today, then check whether the winner caps anything, and whether it will still be there when you want to take an income rather than pay one in. That is three minutes of arithmetic on a decision you will live with for thirty years.