Months into My Future Fund, Ireland's new auto-enrolment pension scheme, most of the conversation has understandably focused on getting the mechanics right: payroll integration, contribution phasing, eligibility checks. Less attention has gone to a related question that will matter to the over 760,000 workers now automatically saving into the scheme: how will the fund's default investment strategy actually perform over the coming decades?

A decade of UK pension performance data, published just months before My Future Fund's launch, doesn't answer that question directly; Ireland's scheme is too new for its own track record to exist yet. But it does offer a useful preview of the kind of performance gap that can open up once a default fund has years of results behind it.

Ireland's new default, and a question worth asking early

My Future Fund went live on 1 January 2026, ending Ireland's position as the only OECD country without a mandatory workplace pension savings system. Contributions from employees, employers, and the State are pooled into one of four investment strategies, with a default lifecycle strategy automatically applied to anyone who doesn't actively choose one.

Given how auto-enrolment schemes tend to work elsewhere, where the large majority of members stick with whatever default is offered rather than actively selecting an alternative, that default strategy is likely to shape the retirement outcome for most of the scheme's members, whether or not they ever engage with the choice at all.

That's the same basic dynamic the UK has lived with for over a decade, in a very differently structured system.

The decade of results the UK already has

The clearest illustration comes from outside Ireland entirely. The UK's Corporate Adviser has been running exactly this comparison for its default pension funds since long before My Future Fund existed, and its most recent CAPAdata figures put a hard number on how much a default choice can shape a saver's outcome. Across the 10 years to December 2025, the best-performing default fund returned 232%, while the worst returned just 88%. TPT Retirement Solutions sat third in that ranking.

Asked to make sense of the gap, TPT's DC Director Philip Smith pointed to something that has less to do with the UK specifically and more to do with how any default fund, anywhere, tends to get judged:

"For a long time, scale and low cost have carried a built-in assumption of safety. Big feels credible. Cheap feels efficient. Both are easy to defend. But member outcomes are what matter, and outcomes like these are a reminder that size and price do not, on their own, define value."

It's worth being precise about what this comparison can and can't tell us. My Future Fund is overseen centrally by the National Automatic Enrolment Retirement Savings Authority (NAERSA), with day-to-day administration handled by Tata Consultancy Services, and a single default lifecycle strategy for non-choosers; the UK operates a fragmented, multi-provider market where dozens of different default funds compete and perform very differently from one another.

The two systems aren't directly comparable, and nothing here suggests My Future Fund will replicate the specific 232%/88% spread seen in the UK data. What the UK's decade of results does establish is a broader point that applies regardless of a scheme's structure: a default fund's long-term performance is not something that can be safely assumed from low fees or government backing alone. It has to be measured and reviewed over time.

Building the review habit early, not after a decade

For Irish employers navigating My Future Fund's first year, the practical takeaway isn't to second-guess the scheme itself. The takeaway is narrower and more useful: build the habit of tracking and reviewing the default strategy's performance from the outset, rather than waiting years for enough data to accumulate before asking the question. The UK's decade of results exists precisely because performance wasn't tracked closely from day one; by the time the gap became visible, it had already been compounding for years.

Employers fielding employee questions during My Future Fund's early phase should be ready to speak to how the default strategy performs, not only how the scheme works administratively. As more performance data becomes available in the years ahead, that's the question employees are increasingly likely to ask, whether it's the one being prepared for today.