Pension on a £110,000 salary — 60% effective relief — use it.

At £110,000 you're £10,000 inside the 60% effective marginal tax band created by the personal allowance taper. Your income tax is around £29,432 plus you've lost half of your £12,570 personal allowance, costing you another £2,514 in tax. The marginal effective rate on every pound between £100,000 and £125,140 is 60% — meaning a £10,000 pension contribution from £110k effectively costs you only £4,000 net after combined relief. Over 20 years of contributing at this rate, the compounded value of the tax saving alone runs into hundreds of thousands of pounds. This is the salary band where pension contributions stop being 'a sensible thing to do' and start being 'mathematically the highest-return investment you can make'. The trap: many high earners default to a low workplace contribution rate and never take advantage of the 60% band at all.