Please note that 13 contribution payments and two bonus sacrifice payments will be included in your Annual Allowance (which is the maximum amount that can be paid by you and AXA into your pension in a tax year without incurring a tax charge) for the period March 2021 to March 2022. This only applies to the 2021/22 Tax year. For the vast majority of employees this will not have an impact as the standard Annual Allowance is £40k in a tax year.
The reason this has happened is that a different methodology is used by Aegon (the previous administrators of the AXA UK Group Pension Scheme) and LifeSight (who administer the current Master trust arrangement) in determining how payments are treated within a tax year. Aegon determine the effective date for contribution payments based upon the date the contribution is invested, whilst LifeSight determine the effective date for contribution payments based upon the month of deduction from salary.
For the tax year 2022/23, it will revert to 12 contribution payments from April 2022 to March 2023, plus the bonus sacrifice payment for March 2023.
You can check your contributions paid in previous tax years on your LifeSight account under My Contributions / Tax / View My Tax Position, and see if you have any unused Annual Allowance in the previous three years, which you can carry forward.
Further details are provided in this pdf, so please read it carefully. If you expect this to cause any problems for you, please contact the AXA pensions team at pensions.uk@axa.co.uk