The freeze, made visible

Will your pension still buy your life?

A pension is a nominal number. What it buys, a decade into a move abroad, is three forces at once: whether it is uprated or frozen, the exchange rate carrying it into local currency, and local prices rising underneath it. Drag your own figures and watch the real value of the money move — and see the gap the freeze opens against the pensioner who moved to a country that still uprates.

Your income

Home currency

GBP USD EUR AUD

Destination

Thailand Philippines

Pension now / month

Pension track

Frozen Uprated

A UK State Pension is frozen in Thailand, uprated in the Philippines. Both tracks are always drawn, so the freeze cost stays visible whichever you pick.

Home uprating % / yr (COLA)

The forces — edit these

Local inflation % / yr

The reweighted retiree basket ran about 0.9%/yr in Thailand and 3.37%/yr in the Philippines over the last seven years. The 2% default sits between them.

Annual FX drift % (home → local)

Negative = your home currency buys fewer local units over time (the sterling-in-baht trap). Positive = it strengthens.

Purchasing-power floor %

Horizon (years)

The base case — frozen, Bangkok, 25 years

Interactive results need JavaScript; the base case is shown below. A Briton who retired to Thailand on the full new State Pension (£241.30/week today) has it frozen at the arrival rate. The pensioner who moved to the Philippines — or any country that still uprates — keeps the rises. The 2016 retiree still receives £155.65/week; the uprated figure is £241.30, 55% more, for the identical contribution record.

Year	Frozen real index	Uprated (2.5%) real index
0	100	100
10	82	105
15	74	108
25	61	113

Frozen, real purchasing power drops below the 75% floor in year 15 and reaches 61 by year 25 — the pension buys 39% less than on arrival, at local inflation of 2% alone. The 23-point year-10 gap is entirely the freeze.

Model only — no figure here is a sourced quotation. The FX and pension series it reads are open data. Read the pieces behind each force:

Methodology & sources — the short version

The model runs one index, base 100 at arrival: index(t) = 100 · (pensionₜ/pension₀) · (fxₜ/fx₀) / (1+inflation)ᵗ. Frozen holds the pension flat; uprated grows it at the COLA you set. FX drifts at your rate; local prices compound at the inflation you set. Both tracks are computed every frame so the freeze gap is always on screen.

Dated anchors behind the defaults — all editable:

Entry FX rates are the latest observation of each currency×country pair in this site's FX ledgers (as of 2026-08): GBP→THB 44.46, USD→THB 33.06, USD→PHP 60.981. GBP→PHP is not ledgered, so GBP is restricted to Thailand.
Pension anchor £241.30/week is the full new UK State Pension (2026/27) from the uk-state-pension-uprating ledger; the default monthly figure is that rate ×52÷12.
Local inflation defaults to a conservative 2% — between the reweighted-retiree-basket rates of 0.9%/yr (Thailand) and 3.37%/yr (Philippines) over 2018–2025.
Uprating and FX drift are illustrative knobs, not sourced predictions — set them to your own view.

The full trace — every assumption, scenario, and per-figure source — is kept in this site's source file for this tool (content/data/pension-purchasing-power.yml), and the FX and CPI series are published as open data under /data.