UniSuper will halve the asset-based administration fee on its Flexi Pension product from 1 July 2026, passing the benefit of lower operating costs to more than 42,000 members in the retirement phase.

The fee has fallen from 0.16 per cent to 0.08 per cent. UniSuper says that for a Flexi Pension account balance of $500,000 invested in the Balanced option, total annual fees and costs will be $2,696 after the reduction, compared with an average of $4,900 for pension products in the same growth category, according to the Chant West Pension Fee Survey from December 2025.

The $170 billion fund says affected members will save on average around $495 a year, and some will save as much as $625. Around 42,000 UniSuper members hold more than 53,000 Flexi Pension accounts, with an asset value of about $31.5 billion.

UniSuper says the fee reduction sprang from two factors: the increased scale of its pension book; and efficiency gains from migrating pension members onto the same administration platform used for accumulation members, completed in late 2022. 

Darren Williams, UniSuper’s head of retirement income, says the fund’s pension book has roughly doubled in size over the past five years, creating a solid basis for the reduction. Running all members on a single system has cut fixed operating costs, simplified change management and provided new opportunities for additional automation.

“If you simplify your business, you have savings to pass back, so we have a reduced cost base to share across a growing part of the membership. It’s the saving from the migration, as well as the fact that the pension part of the business is larger,” Williams says.

The fee-cut decision arose through UniSuper’s annual fee review, which Williams says balances trustee obligations, expected ongoing costs, long-term organisational needs, and market position. 

Pricing is part of the consideration, but Williams says that before any fee reduction can be considered, the fund must satisfy itself on financial resilience, reserving strategy, and its capacity to keep investing in the business. 

“Those ducks really need to line up before we can get on to essentially even thinking about passing back that level of savings to members,” he says. 

“Price is only one element of value, so this is the critical thing for us. We want the financial outcomes for members, but we also want the absolute best experience we can. We don’t want to diminish what members have come to expect from UniSuper just because we’ve decided to reduce the price.”

By-product of efficiency

UniSuper says pricing is a by-product of efficiency rather than a first-order member retention strategy in response to competition from platforms and a reinvigorated retail super sector. Williams says that for now, eight basis points is about as low as the fee can go.

“There has to be a floor. More of the system is moving into drawdown, so more of the fixed cost is moving into the drawdown products,” he says.

“There are more accounts in the system in the long run, but the instances of duplicate accounts and other things like that have diminished. There’s more accounts, but the efficiency has increased. So by its nature, there will be a fixed-cost floor, and funds will need to work out how to manage that in the long run.”

Williams says an absence of legacy systems means a fund such as UniSuper can be both big and efficient, “whereas other large funds may have large legacy issues that they need to work through, and then that constrains what they can pass back in terms of benefits to members”.

UniSuper’s retirement strategy is “advice-led and personalised” and it offers internal financial advice, digital advice and links to external advisers to support members as they make the transition to retirement and guide them on how to use products effectively to help them do that.

“A member generally will draw their income through a hierarchy [of] Age Pension first; guaranteed income [such as an immediate annuity]; and then perhaps take the remainder that they need from their account based pension,” Williams says.

He says that in this context the Flexi Pension product itself “doesn’t need to be a complicated product”. 

“[It] needs to have the right suite of investment options, it needs to be priced appropriately, and it needs to have the income management features that allow for that income layering.”