What’s an overpayment

An overpayment is when you’ve submitted your contribution schedule for payment and you’ve paid too much. This can only happen when you have a direct credit payment source and you’re making a BACS or CHAPS payment. If you’re paying by Direct Debit we’ll only collect the amount shown on screen.

If a member opts out or becomes ineligible in between the schedule being submitted and the payment being allocated, you may receive the money for that member back in the form of an overpayment refund.

For example, if you make a payment of £100 for a contribution schedule and a member opts out who was due a contribution of £10, we'll allocate the remaining £90 and refund £10 to you as an overpayment for the opted-out member.

You may also receive an overpayment refund if you haven't clicked ‘Submit schedule’ on a contribution schedule. This is because we won’t realise we’re expecting a payment and will refund the money to you. If you've included the correct IT reference number we’ll be able to recognise who sent us the money and send a message to your secure NEST mailbox to let you know when we refund the money.

If you haven't provided the right payment reference we won’t be able to match it and the whole payment will be returned automatically. We won’t be able to send you a message to let you know we’re returning the money as we won’t know who it was from.