I've received a letter from my pension provider that I've gone over the annual allowance for pension contributions this year. According to HMRC, I can carry over unused allowance for the past 3 years, and they recommend using their Pension Allowance Calculator to work this out.
When I try and use the calculator, it's asking me which years I was a member of a workplace pension, going back to 2010. It then asks me, for each year, what my contributions were.
The trouble I have is:
- I don't have copies of my payslips going back that far (these were paper payslips at the time, and I didn't think I'd need to retain these for 11 years!)
- Old P60s don't seem to list pension contributions (I assume because it's salary sacrifice)
- I've amalgamated old workplace pensions into one (as I had about 6 of them), so if I look online I can just see the date that the lump-sum was transferred into the new provider, not the historic details.
Is there an easy way to get this info that HMRC needs? I've tried logging into Government Gateway and checking my personal tax account, but can't find any details of private pension contributions (only e.g. National Insurance payments)
Or can I just go back 3 years (since that's all that I'm eligible to carry over anyway?)