The dashboard will be available Oct 31 2026 but that does not mean business as usual for savers

Open your browser, type in “when will I be able to use the pension dashboard” and you’ll be told by artificial intelligence

The answer I got when I asked when I could use the pension dashboard to find my pensions

That is the misinformation I have been fed for the past few years and very pleased I was that the days passed by and October 2026 was getting closer.

Very pleased that is until I and my team collared Richard Smith in the Collaboration Room of the RSA yesterday afternoon. He told us that we are fundamentally mistaken in thinking the launch of the dashboard is October 2026, that is the deadline for the back end of the dashboard to be completed, that does not mean that the dashboard will go live with consumers

Look at this diagram, one of many he left us with

look to the right of the timeline and notice that the target testing time for the Consumer front end spills into Q1 2027. Richard thinks the earliest MaPS will deploy the functionality of the dashboard for the benefit of consumers (eg you and me) is the end of Q1 2027 and it could be a lot later than that if the feedback over the next 13 months isn’t perfect.

I turned to the statements from MaPS to get a view from what sits on their website.

What the 31st October deadline is about , is the last date for pension and providers to have made their information available to the dashboard. That is not a promise to consumers that they’ll get to see it and Richard Smith expects that consumers testing according to the timeline he’s provided above, will be demanding improvements to what they see way beyond October 2026. And of course, this being a Government project, there is the usual palaver about anything going live which makes October 2026 a 2% possibility (Smith’s estimate).

I have to say I felt a bit of a mug having fallen for artificial intelligence and I guess that Richard isn’t able to say this kind of thing openly because he has had so much to do with the front end (work which I hugely admire).

It is incredible that so little consumer testing has happened so far. Richard tells me that in other countries which have introduced the dashboard, the consumer was at the heart of the build and that consumers were testing from pretty well day one. This has not been the case, not only has MaPS decided to release everything at the same time, but they’ve not told us when that is. This makes the likelihood of further delays all the more likely.

The pressure on those who are launching the dashboard must already be immense and how is it going to go for MaPS and their team as the realisation of the public that it’s not going to happen, becomes general? I’m sure they’re moaning that they had to do it this way and that politicians have made their lives difficult but the truth has been very little in evidence recently.

We got an update this summer with this statement which is on the web

This tells us that if we don’t get a statement by 3oth April 2026 from the Pension Minister, we will know that the date we thought was October has slipped. Hang about, according to the timeline above, that’s bang in the middle of “Testing 2”. That doesn’t work!

Now I come to think of it , I have not heard Chris Curry , let alone Oliver Morley , MaPS’ CEO, with any utterance about what the likes of you and me will be seeing and when.

This must be infuriating to the providers of data because for all the work that has gone into 60m pots and pensions being available to MaPS , none of this data is going to be available to pre-view or plan for. There’s a lot more data to come , by October 31st there should be well over 100m items available online but there is no statement or likelihood that this will happen if you are a punter – sorry consumer.

Me and my team who had been in the Collaboration Room of the RSA in Central London felt that the only collaboration going on was for the very noble Richard Smith. This must change.

It is time that Chris Curry made timescales clear.

We cannot continue to be duped. We are only 13 months away and many of us will say we’ve been waiting 10 years to be told when. When will consumers be able to see their pensions on a dashboard?

Where Richard Smith broke the news to AgeWage. The RSA Collaboration Room.