Nest invests in windfarms, timber forests, and big tech companies such as Apple and Tesla.Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images / Alamy
More than 13 million people in the UK belong to it, and it looks after £50bn of their cash – but you may have never heard ofit. The National Employment Savings Trust (Nest) has grown to be the largest workplace pension scheme by member numbers, with more than a third of UK employees enrolled in it .
It’s 20 years ago this year since a government commission recommended creating “a low-cost, national funded pension savings scheme” into which individuals would be “automatically enrolled”. That led to Nest being set up as a publicly owned body to invest people’s pension savings.
Data shared with the Guardian reveals that, to date, some Nest members have almost tripled their money once you include employer contributions and investment returns. That beats what they would have made from other savings products such as Isas.
We looked at what Nest is doing with your retirement savings.
What goes in
Set up as a public corporation as part of the government’s automatic enrolment revolution, Nest was described at the time as “the biggest shake-up in UK pensions for over 100 years” and designed to get millions more people paying into a pension.
Auto-enrolment requires all employers to automatically put eligible workers into a workplace pension where both parties pay money in. It even applies to those employing just one person, such as some people who employ a nanny, carer or gardener.
The regime officially kicked off in 2012 and affects everyone in work aged between 22 and the state pension age who earns more than £10,000 a year and does not already have a suitable workplace pension.
Employers must choose a provider to run the scheme for them. This provider takes the money and invests it to generate returns. Big-name employers that are using, or have used, Nest to enrol at least some employees into a pension include the BBC, McDonald’s and BT.
You may not be in Nest yourself, but if – for example – you have a child or grandchild who started working during the last few years, they may well have a Nest pension pot. Most members are aged 20 to 39.
Other providers include The People’s Pension, now:pensions and Smart Pension – but with more than 13.7 million members, Nest is by far the biggest.
The investments
Do you have an iPhone? Do you shop on Amazon? Do you use Google? If you have money in Nest, your pension may be riding on the fortunes of the big US tech firms behind such products and brands.
As of the end of March, the top eight shareholdings of Nest’s default “2040 retirement date fund” were: Apple; Microsoft; the US-based computer chip maker Nvidia; Amazon; Google’s parent company Alphabet; the Facebook owner Meta; the investment company Berkshire Hathaway; and the carmaker Tesla.
Some members may be uneasy about how much of their money is crossing the Atlantic, in effect helping to make tech oligarchs such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg even wealthier.
That said, while a sizeable chunk of people’s money is invested in global shares, Nest is increasingly moving into investments such as private assets (including private equity and infrastructure) and private credit (basically loans to businesses).
In the UK, for example, it has invested in everything from windfarms, including the huge Hornsea 1 project off the east coast of England, and solar farms, including one in Reading. It has also bought into port operators such as Forth Ports, which runs Tilbury, and shopping centres such as the Dolphin in Poole, Dorset.
Nest recently announced it would be helping to build thousands of new homes for rent through a link-up with other organisations. Manchester’s New Jackson neighbourhood has been named as the first site.
One interesting business in Nest’s portfolio is Deep Green, which uses the heat generated by datacentres to help UK swimming pools save money and ultimately stay open by reducing their costs.
Nest’s private market holdings include loans to a five-star hotel in Paris and a French cinema group, and investments in timber – for example, it part-owns a forest in Washington state in the US.
The performance
We asked Nest to provide performance data, plus figures for how much people who joined the scheme at the start may have in their pension funds now.
It based its calculations on someone on an average annual UK full-time income of £37,000 who, since October 2012, has made pension contributions each month at the minimum level. The figures are based on them saving into Nest’s default 2040 retirement fund.
The individual would have paid in £7,605, and their employer £6,172. They have received £1,901 of tax relief on top – paid into the fund – and benefited from £5,482 of investment growth. Lop off Nest’s charges – £521 in this case – and their fund is worth £20,639 (as of the end of April this year).
However, the figure for someone using Nest’s “higher risk” fund – for those willing to take more risk in the hope that their pot will grow faster – is £21,011. For its ethical fund option, the figure is £19,082.
Trillions of dollars were wiped from global stock markets in early April after Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs, but markets later rallied, and the good news is that those three figures are all slightly higher than they were at the end of March.
Nest’s 2040 retirement fund has delivered a total cumulative return of 199% up to the end of April 2025, assuming someone signed up on day one, while the higher risk fund delivered 236%, and the ethical fund 208%.
A typical global investment fund has delivered a return of about 212% over the same period, while a typical Europe (including the UK) fund has delivered 188%, according to the data provider Morningstar Direct.
The ‘small pots’ problem
While Nest has more than 13 million members, the most recent data showed that more than 9 million of them were “non-contributing” members who were not topping up their pots. Many are people who started a job and were put into the Nest scheme, but then quit that job for another one, leaving their pot behind.
A very rough calculation suggests the average Nest pension pot size is perhaps a little more than £3,800. That disguises a wide range of values: while some pots will be sizeable, others will have perhaps just a few hundred pounds in them.
If you are unsure whether or not you have money held in Nest, check your paperwork – it will have sent you a welcome pack shortly after your employer put you into the scheme.
Nest has a page on its website on identifying your pension pots. You can also call its member help centre on 0300 0200 393, which should be able to help locate your Nest account, if you have one.
If you do, you can view it by logging into your online account – you will need to provide your national insurance number when you do so for the first time.
