The State of Irish
PRSA Pension Fees
2026

The Headlines

At a glance

The headline numbers from this review of the Irish PRSA market. Each figure is explored in detail in the sections that follow.

Report key findings

The Irish PRSA market context

Contents

In this report

• 1At a glance2
• 2Executive overview4
• 3The annual charge5
• 4The contribution charge6
• 5Standard vs non-standard PRSAs7
• 6Curated vs brokerage PRSAs8
• 7How fees can impact a retirement portfolio9
• 8The impact of fees at the national scale10
• 9Methodological Notes17

Executive Overview

Overview

A PRSA is a personal, portable pension account that a saver owns directly, into which they and their employer can make tax-advantaged contributions towards retirement. Crucially, a PRSA is not tied to any one provider: savers are free to transfer their pension to a different PRSA provider at any time without penalty.

This report reviews the charges applied across the 168 Personal Retirement Savings Account (PRSA) products approved for sale in Ireland across 180 distinct product variants.

Annual charges range from 0.25% to 3.13%; the highest charge in the market is 12.5× the lowest. Because this charge is levied on the entire fund every year, small differences in the headline percentage can compound into materially different outcomes over the decades a pension is typically held.

Contribution charges vary more starkly still: of the 168 products reviewed, 88 (52%) have at least one variant that applies a contribution charge, while 72 (43%) apply no contribution charge on any variant.

Charges also cluster at the regulatory ceilings that apply to standard PRSAs (1.00% on the annual charge and 5% on contributions). Of the 180 variants reviewed, 48 are standard PRSAs. Of those 48 standard variants, 37 quote a highest annual charge of exactly 1.00% — and of those, 36 quote no lower rate at all: a flat 1.00% charge, precisely at the statutory ceiling. A further 10 standard variants quote a contribution charge of exactly 5%, the corresponding cap on contributions.

These charges apply across a market of 364,148 PRSA contracts holding €23,804,013,708 in assets, and therefore have a broad impact on wealth across Irish society. A 1% annual fee (the most common minimum annual charge across PRSA products) applied to those reported assets would equate to €238 Million a year. Notably, though, the distribution of savers across providers, products, and fee levels is not published. The national fee figures in this report are therefore sensitivity calculations applied to reported assets, not measurements of fees actually paid. Section 7 sets out this illustrative calculation in full.

The pages that follow outline the state of Irish PRSA pension fees as they stand as of 2026, plus worked examples showing the impact fees can have at both the individual saver and national scales.

Section 2

The annual charge

The charge deducted from the fund each year, expressed as a percentage of the amount invested. It applies for as long as the pension is held, so it typically amounts to the larger charge over the lifetime of a pension, even if the contribution charge is nominally higher. Across the 180 variants reviewed, annual charges range from 0.25% to 3.13%.

Many variants quote a range rather than a single figure, since the charge can depend on factors like the fund value and the underlying investment vehicle chosen. We therefore present below two separate distributions: One of the lowest charge quoted (first chart) and another of the highest charge quoted (second chart).

The median lowest charge quoted is 1%, and the median highest is 1.37%. The charts below show, band by band, how many variants fall at each level, first by the lowest charge quoted within each variant, then by the highest charge quoted.

2.1 Lowest charge quoted

2.2 Highest charge quoted

Section 3

The contribution charge

The contribution charge (where one applies) is deducted from each pension contribution before it is invested. It varies starkly across the market; from zero to several percent of every contribution. Of the 168 products reviewed, 88 (52%) have at least one variant that deducts a percentage from lump-sum contributions, and 93 (55%) from regular contributions.

The highest charge reported was 7% on lump-sum payments and 7% on regular payments. Many variants quote a range rather than a single figure, since the charge can depend on the size of the contribution (with tiered discounts for larger amounts). The charts below show, band by band, how many variants fall at each level, comparing the lowest charge quoted against the highest charge quoted for both lump-sum and regular contributions.

3.1 Lump-sum contributions

3.2 Regular contributions

Section 4

Standard vs non-standard PRSAs

PRSAs are divided by regulation into two categories. Standard PRSAs are subject to statutory caps on charges: 1% for the annual charge and 5% for the contribution charge. Non-standard PRSAs are not bound by that cap and can apply a broader range of fees. The charts below compare the spread of fees (lower end of the reported range) across standard and non-standard PRSAs.

Annual fees vary much more broadly for non-standard PRSAs than for standard PRSAs: Both the highest and lowest annual fees are seen on non-standard products. Standard PRSA annual fees fall within a much narrower range.

Standard PRSA charges do not merely stay under the 1.00% ceiling — they concentrate on it: 36 of the 48 standard variants charge exactly 1.00% per year, with no lower rate quoted.

Section 5

Curated vs brokerage PRSAs

This section looks again at the annual charge from Section 2, this time split by the breadth of investment choice a variant offers. Curated-range PRSAs give access to a limited selection of funds (typically around 5–20); brokerage PRSAs open up a huge investment range, much like a traditional stockbroking account. The chart below shows how the lowest annual charge quoted within each variant is distributed across the two groups. Note that for brokerage PRSAs, stockbroking and fees at the underlying investment level are additional to the listed fees.

The brokerage/curated grouping is defined by PensionCheck.ie. Note that the annual and contribution charges shown here are not the whole cost of a brokerage PRSA: Stockbroking fees and fees at the level of the underlying investment vehicle are additional to the figures above.

Section 6

How fees can impact a retirement portfolio

To illustrate how charges can translate into real money, consider two hypothetical savers who each invest €5,000 a year for 40 years into two different example PRSA products. Both funds are assumed to grow at the same 4% a year before charges. The only difference is the charging structure: one product applies a 0% contribution charge and an 0.75% annual charge; the other applies a 3% contribution charge and an 1.75% annual charge.

These figures are simplified and serve for illustration only. Assumptions: contributions invested at the start of each year net of any contribution charge; gross growth of 4% a year; the annual charge deducted from the fund each year.

Section 7

The impact of fees at the national scale

The preceding section illustrated how charges can affect one individual retirement portfolio. This page takes the national perspective: it applies several illustrative annual charge rates to the €23,804,013,708 of PRSA assets reported for Q1 2026.

Information on the total value of PRSA fees paid each year is not available. However, we can perform an illustrative sensitivity analysis of annual charges by multiplying the total reported PRSA funds by a range of illustrative annual charges. The result of this sensitivity analysis (below) shows that Irish pension savers are likely paying annual fees of hundreds of millions of euro per year, plus an additional unknown amount in contribution fees.

Illustrative annual sensitivity

Appendix · Products

Products reviewed

The full list of 168 Personal Retirement Savings Account products included in this analysis, as approved for sale in Ireland (based on data from The Pensions Authority, June 2026).

Appendix · Products (continued)

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Appendix · Products (continued)

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Appendix · Products (continued)

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Appendix · Products (continued)

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Appendix · Products (continued)

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Appendix · Notes

Methodological Notes