Planning ahead? Right place. Has an employee just died? The scheme pays out through its own process — start with what to do when someone dies and HR; the estate may also need Executor's First Hour.
Death in service is an employer benefit — a lump sum, typically a multiple of your salary, paid if you die while employed there. Many schemes pay two to four times salary. It's usually provided through a group life policy the employer holds, written under a discretionary arrangement — which is why the money is not part of your estate and your will has no authority over it. The scheme's trustees decide who receives it, guided — not bound — by your nomination.
The trustees must consider your nomination; the final decision is theirs. Same machinery as a pension's expression of wish — and often a separate form from your pension nomination, sometimes the same one; the only way to know is to check both.
That discretion is usually exercised sensibly against real circumstances — but usually is not an instruction, and nobody can instruct them — not you, not your family, not your executor. What you control is whether the form on file describes your actual life.
Do not assume either result without the scheme's decision.
Most schemes: walk out the door, cover stops — the form doesn't follow you to the new job; new job, new form.
Paid under discretion, it usually falls outside the estate for inheritance tax — and it's excluded from the April 2027 pension-tax changes.
It pays on top of any pension death benefits and any personal life insurance — which is why families often don't know to expect it.
The multiple is the part everyone quotes, and it is the part that matters least. A death-in-service benefit is a multiple of something — and schemes disagree about what that something is. Salary, pensionable pay, assumed pensionable pay and full-time-equivalent salary can all produce a different answer for the same person in the same job.
Three things this table is not. It is not a quote — only your scheme administrator can tell you your figure. It covers active members: if you have left the employer but not yet drawn the pension, most schemes switch to a completely different calculation based on your pension rather than your pay. And where you hold service in an older section of the same scheme, the rule that applies to you may be the old one, not the one above.
Ask HR or the benefits portal: is there death-in-service cover, at what multiple, and who is currently nominated — and when was that recorded?
New partner, new child, a divorce, a bereavement since you signed — replace the form via the scheme, keep the confirmation. A missing nomination leaves the trustees deciding with no steer at all.
Your people should know the sentence: there is death-in-service cover at work, the nomination is current, and the pension's form is checked too. That sentence lives in the household dossier.
Death in service is the fourth instance of the same master fact: some of the largest sums a household holds are directed outside the will. One document reconciles all four views for the people who'll need them — that's the household dossier's whole job.
Household dossier
Put all four beyond-the-will assets where your family can find them.
See the household dossierInformational, not legal, financial, or tax advice, and covers England & Wales only. Death-in-service benefits are governed by each scheme's rules and the trustees' decisions — verify the current position with your employer's scheme and at GOV.UK.
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