Transferring an Aegon pension to Trading 212: check your plan number

Aegon is being sold. In April 2026 the group agreed to hand Aegon UK to Standard Life for £2.0 billion, with completion expected around the end of this year.

If that is what brought you here, it should not decide anything. Your pension sits in a ring-fenced structure and does not become less safe because the name above the door changes. Escaping a takeover is not a reason to move a pension.

Going and looking at what you hold is a different matter, and with Aegon that is most of the work.

Aegon is not one pension. Start with the number on your statement

Aegon grew by buying things. Scottish Equitable, then BlackRock's UK workplace pension business and the Cofunds platform. Each arrived with its own contracts and its own administration, and Aegon still runs most of them separately. Two people can both say "I have an Aegon pension" and hold products with twenty years and several thousand pounds of charges between them.

The reference number on your paperwork identifies which one you have. Aegon publishes the formats so customers know which login to use, and the same table works as a diagnostic:

The first four rows are modern platform products, holding ordinary funds with no guarantees attached. Transferring out of one is dull admin and nothing worse.

The last row is the one to slow down on.

The Scottish Equitable question

Aegon is a trading name of Scottish Equitable plc, and Scottish Equitable was writing pensions in Britain for a century before Aegon acquired it in the 1990s. If your plan number has no leading digit that maps to a platform, you are probably in one of those older contracts.

Older contracts sometimes carry safeguarded benefits. The ones that matter:

• A Guaranteed Annuity Rate, promising to convert your pot into income at a rate written decades ago. Contracts from the 1980s and early 1990s can carry rates in the high single digits or above, well clear of what the open market pays now. That guarantee is sometimes worth more than the pot itself
• A Guaranteed Minimum Pension, from a plan that was contracted out of the State Earnings Related Pension Scheme
• Protected tax-free cash above the usual 25%
• A protected pension age below 55

You cannot give any of these to Trading 212, because Trading 212 does not accept safeguarded benefits. And you cannot casually give them up either. Where safeguarded benefits are worth more than £30,000, the FCA requires you to take regulated financial advice before transferring, and the receiving scheme has to see confirmation that you did.

There is a second, quieter blocker in these contracts. Trading 212 cannot accept pensions established before 6 April 2006. A lot of Scottish Equitable plans are older than that, and they fail on the date alone regardless of what they contain. If your plan started in the nineties, check this before you spend an afternoon on anything else.

Aegon will confirm all of it in writing if you ask. Request a transfer value with details of any guarantees or safeguarded benefits attached, and do not rely on a summary screen in an app to tell you.

What Trading 212 will accept

Trading 212 takes uncrystallised Defined Contribution pensions only. Not anything in drawdown, not anything you have already taken tax-free cash from, not anything carrying safeguarded benefits, and not pensions established before 6 April 2006. Each pot needs its own transfer request, so consolidating three old Aegon pots means three separate journeys.

Your money arrives as cash. Aegon's funds are Aegon's funds and they do not exist on Trading 212, so the transfer happens by selling everything, moving sterling, and letting you rebuild from scratch. Nothing is invested when it lands.

The wider pre-transfer checklist, including bundled life cover and the things that catch people out at the receiving end, is in our walkthrough of moving a workplace pension into the T212 SIPP.

What it costs to stay, and what it costs to move

Neither side charges for the transfer itself. Aegon states it does not charge a transfer-out fee, and Trading 212 does not charge to accept one.

The exception lives in the old contracts again. Some legacy Scottish Equitable with-profits policies apply a market value reduction on exit, and some carry an early exit adjustment. Neither is a fee in the sense of a line on an invoice. Both reduce what actually arrives, and both are worth asking about by name.

On ongoing charges, the modern Aegon products sit in ordinary platform territory once the platform charge and the fund charges are added together, and workplace schemes are often cheaper still because the employer negotiated the rate. Legacy Scottish Equitable contracts are where the genuinely expensive ones hide. Your annual statement gives the figure for your own plan. Compare that, not a range you read somewhere.

Trading 212 discloses one fee on the SIPP: 0.15% on currency conversion. Hold sterling-priced investments and you pay nothing at all.

So the fee case is strong against a legacy contract and thin against a modern one. On a £20,000 pot, moving from 1% to zero saves about £200 a year. Moving from a 0.35% workplace rate saves £70, which is real but not enough to build a decision on by itself.

If you have read that the T212 SIPP carries an annual operator fee of around £90, that figure is wrong. We published it ourselves and have corrected it.

Timelines, and being out of the market

Trading 212 quotes two to eight weeks for cash transfers. A straightforward Aegon workplace or Retiready pot is commonly reported at four to six weeks. Legacy Scottish Equitable contracts run longer, because they are administered on older systems and more of the process involves paper.

For part of that window your pension is sold and your money is in transit. No amount of organisation avoids it. On a large pot in a volatile month, being out of the market can cost more than the first year of fee savings.

The takeover may add to that. No migration has been announced and none may happen for years, but if one does, transfers are the kind of thing that slows down while it runs. Treat that as a reason not to leave a decision half-made for eighteen months, rather than a reason to rush one.

Two people, the same pot, different answers

Both are 53 with £20,000 sitting in a dormant Aegon pension, and both plan to leave it until 65. The only difference is the number on the statement.

Priya's plan number is six digits with a UP prefix, so she is in a legacy Scottish Equitable contract charging around 1% a year. Marcus has an account number starting A/00, so he is in TargetPlan, where his old employer negotiated about 0.35%.

At 5% a year before charges, here is what staying put costs each of them against moving to a SIPP charging nothing.

Priya gives up £3,896 by staying, close to a fifth of what she started with. Marcus gives up £1,411, which is real money but a much thinner argument.

That gap is the whole point of checking the plan number. Same provider, same pot, same twelve years, and one of them has nearly three times as much to gain as the other.

There is a cost on the other side that the chart cannot show. Both of them will be out of the market for four to six weeks while the transfer settles, and on a £20,000 pot a bad month can run to several hundred pounds. For Priya that is a rounding error against £3,896. For Marcus it could swallow the first two years of what he saves, which is worth knowing before he starts.

And if Priya's contract turns out to carry a Guaranteed Annuity Rate, none of this arithmetic matters. She should stay.

So should you move it?

Move it if your statement shows a legacy plan number with no guarantees on it, a charge meaningfully above zero, and a start date after April 2006. In that case the numbers are clear enough to act on.

Think harder if it is a modern Aegon platform product. The charge gap is small and you will be out of the market for a month while you close it.

Do not move it at all if there is a Guaranteed Annuity Rate on the contract, or a Guaranteed Minimum Pension, or protected cash above 25%. Trading 212 cannot take it, and the guarantee is usually worth more than every fee argument on this page combined.

Whichever way you go, base it on what the plan holds rather than on who owns Aegon next year.

Frequently asked questions

Can I transfer an Aegon pension to the Trading 212 SIPP?

Usually yes for a modern Aegon plan: a straightforward uncrystallised Defined Contribution pot, no guarantees attached, not in drawdown, and set up after 6 April 2006. Older Scottish Equitable contracts are the ones that fail, either because they carry safeguarded benefits or because they predate 2006, which Trading 212 cannot accept.

Does Aegon charge a fee to transfer out?

No. Aegon does not charge a transfer-out fee, and Trading 212 does not charge to accept a transfer. Some very old Scottish Equitable contracts apply a market value reduction or an early exit adjustment, which is not a fee but has the same effect on what arrives.

How do I know which Aegon pension I have?

The number on your statement tells you. A customer number starting with 2 is Aegon Retirement Choices, One Retirement or Retiready. Starting with 3 is the Aegon Platform. An account number starting A/00 is TargetPlan, the workplace product. A plain plan number of six or seven digits, sometimes prefixed UP, is a legacy Aegon or Scottish Equitable contract, and that is the one to look at carefully.

Does the Standard Life takeover of Aegon UK affect my transfer?

Not directly. Aegon agreed on 15 April 2026 to sell Aegon UK to Standard Life for £2.0 billion, with completion expected around the end of 2026. Your pension sits in a ring-fenced structure and a change of owner does not put it at risk, so the sale is not a reason to transfer. It is a reasonable prompt to check what you are holding.

How long does an Aegon to Trading 212 transfer take?

Trading 212 quotes two to eight weeks for cash transfers, and a straightforward Aegon workplace or Retiready pot is commonly reported at four to six weeks. Legacy Scottish Equitable contracts run longer because they are administered on older systems. Your money is out of the market for part of that.

Can I transfer only part of my Aegon pension?

Aegon allows partial transfers on most modern products, and Trading 212 accepts them. Older contracts are less flexible and some are all or nothing. Aegon will tell you which applies to your plan number.

Where can I get free guidance before I transfer?

UK savers aged 50 and over with a defined contribution pension can book a free Pension Wise appointment through MoneyHelper. gov.uk's pension transfer guidance is the official starting point for everyone else.

The takeaway

Every useful answer about an Aegon transfer starts with which Aegon you have, and the number on your statement settles it in about ten seconds.

Modern platform product, no guarantees, post-2006: it moves, and the case for moving rests on a fee gap that is usually modest.

Legacy Scottish Equitable contract: read it properly before doing anything, because that is where both the expensive charges and the valuable guarantees live, and you cannot tell which you have from the outside.

The Standard Life deal changes none of that. It has just prompted a lot of people to go and check.

This is illustrative, not financial advice. Pension rules change, personal circumstances matter, investment returns are uncertain and past performance tells you nothing reliable about the future. The right answer for me may not be the right answer for you.