Long Money for a Long Game: How Russia's Pension Funds Bet on the Savings Programme in 2026

For most of the past decade, Russia's non-state pension funds looked like an industry in slow retreat: a small, ageing pool of mandatory savings, shrinking corporate programmes and a public that had learned, through repeated reforms, not to trust any promise longer than a bank deposit. In 2026 that picture is changing fast. The Long-Term Savings Programme — known by its Russian abbreviation PDS (programma dolgosrochnykh sberezheniy) — has grown from a policy experiment into the main growth engine of the entire non-state pension fund market, and the industry now believes it has found the formula for money that stays put. As of May 1, 2026, according to Bank of Russia data cited in an analytical overview published by Expert, 12.1 million PDS contracts had been signed and 938 billion rubles had been attracted into the programme. By the end of the year, analysts polled by the magazine expect the accumulated pool to reach as much as 2 trillion rubles.

Those numbers matter far beyond the pension industry itself. A country whose financial system has long depended on short bank deposits and budget flows is watching the first credible attempt to build a domestic pool of genuinely long money — capital locked in for ten, fifteen, twenty years and available, in principle, for infrastructure, corporate bonds and equity investment. In Russia, where the key rate has spent much of the past two years at levels that make short-term saving instruments extremely attractive, persuading households to commit money for a decade and a half is no small feat. The fact that more than twelve million contracts were signed suggests the incentive design — state co-financing, tax relief, and the ability to withdraw in genuine emergencies — has struck a chord.

This deep dive unpacks what is driving the PDS boom in 2026, what the industry's main association and the leading rating agencies expect next, and where the risks hide. It draws on the National Association of Non-State Pension Funds (NAPF) annual report presented on May 22, 2026 at the Investfunds Forum XVII conference of institutional investors in St. Petersburg, and on forecasts from Finam, the National Ratings Agency (NRA) and Expert RA.

A programme that finally found its scale

The PDS was designed as a voluntary co-savings scheme: a citizen opens an account with a non-state pension fund, makes contributions, and the state tops them up on a matching basis within defined limits. The architecture is deliberately simple, and its parameters explain much of the programme's appeal.

• The state can add up to 36,000 rubles a year to a participant's contributions, and it does so for ten years.
• The right to receive the accumulated money as pension-type payments arises after fifteen years of participation, or upon reaching the age of 55 for women and 60 for men.
• Early withdrawal without financial loss is permitted in special life situations — the loss of a breadwinner, the need for expensive medical treatment, and similar cases.
• Participants can also transfer their existing mandatory pension savings into the programme, converting a dormant pot into an actively managed, co-financed one.

The results compound quickly when millions of households participate at once. From a standing start, the programme reached 12.1 million contracts and 938 billion rubles of attracted funds by May 1, 2026. More than half of the non-state pension funds surveyed for the NAPF annual report now regard the potential involvement of maternity capital — the state certificate granted to families on the birth of a child — as one of the key drivers of further growth. That single statistic, presented at the Investfunds Forum XVII in St. Petersburg on May 22, tells you where the industry's imagination is focused in 2026.

Analysts polled by Expert go further: they expect the PDS to become one of the key sources of long money in the economy, and they expect the volume of funds accumulated under the programme to reach up to 2 trillion rubles within this year. For an industry that spent the 2010s managing runoff, that is a qualitative change of role — from custodian of legacy assets to fundraiser for the whole financial system.

The maternity capital question

The most consequential debate around the PDS in 2026 concerns money that has not yet entered the programme at all: maternity capital. Today the certificate can be spent on a narrow set of purposes, above all improving housing conditions and paying for children's education. The industry's proposal is to add a third destination — transferring maternity capital into a PDS account to increase the size of the family's future pension.

The NAPF argues that the pension route has a structural advantage over the existing ones. Unlike housing or education spending, which consume the certificate in a single transaction, money placed in the PDS keeps working for decades — and, crucially, it remains available for early withdrawal without financial loss in special life situations such as the loss of a breadwinner or the need for costly treatment. In other words, the family does not surrender liquidity entirely; it converts a one-off subsidy into a compounding asset with an emergency hatch.

Arkady Nedbay, chairman of the NAPF council, told Expert that an active dialogue on transferring maternity capital funds into the PDS is underway between market participants and the Finance Ministry. The key condition for implementing the initiative, in his formulation, is a legislative decision that also secures the right of the mother herself to dispose of these funds, including in the interests of the children. He stressed that the question has been placed in the category of priority ones, and that if the mechanism is agreed it could start working as early as 2027 — a step he described as significant for the development of family formats of long-term saving.

The Finance Ministry, for its part, told Expert that it supports the initiative conceptually. One of the stated purposes of the PDS is the formation of capital in favour of the family, the ministry's press service noted, which corresponds to the stated purpose of maternity capital itself; routing the certificate into the programme would therefore increase the capital being formed for families. At the same time, the ministry cautioned that given the social significance of the question, it will require discussion with all interested departments — bureaucratic language for the fact that a decision is politically wanted but legally non-trivial.

What inflows of that scale would mean for the market

Market participants rarely use the word colossal, but the prospect of maternity capital entering non-state pension funds comes close to earning it. Yuri Frants, head of the business development department at BKS World of Investments, notes that a transition to investing maternity capital through NPFs would bring a colossal inflow of money to the stock market. His point is twofold. First, today there is effectively no route for investing maternity capital into any financial instrument at all — the certificate is either spent on housing and education or sits unused. Second, the housing route that dominates in practice is far from affordable for everyone: for a great many families, a certificate covers only part of an apartment's price, which pushes them toward using it as a down payment on yet more mortgage debt rather than as an investment.

Yaroslav Kabakov, strategy director at the investment company Finam, frames the same idea in balance-sheet terms. Allowing transfers of maternity capital into the PDS could give the non-state pension funds hundreds of billions of rubles of new long money over several years and would become a powerful driver of the market, he argues. In his assessment, the PDS will remain the main source of growth for NPF assets in 2026. Finam's base scenario projects growth of fund portfolios by 15 to 25 percent this year, with expansion above 30 percent if state support is broadened. Returns, Kabakov adds, are likely to stay high by historical standards — around 12 to 16 percent per annum for 2026 — reflecting the elevated rate environment in which the funds' conservative bond-heavy portfolios were assembled.

It is worth pausing on the phrase long money, because it is the whole point of the exercise. A deposit rolls over every three to twelve months; a money-market fund can be redeemed on any business day; even a corporate bond portfolio turns over within a few years. Pension liabilities, by contrast, are measured in decades, and an asset base funded by fifteen-year savings contracts can be invested accordingly — into longer-dated bonds, into equity stakes, into projects that need patient capital. If the maternity capital initiative passes, the Russian financial system gains not just a bigger pool of savings but a pool with a genuinely different maturity profile.

Forecasts: participants, assets, reserves

The National Ratings Agency offers the most detailed public projection of where the programme goes from here. Elena Fiveyskaya, director of financial institution ratings at NRA, observes that the main participants in the PDS today are women — a demographic fact with direct policy implications, since the possibility of increasing future pension payments through maternity capital is precisely the kind of proposition likely to interest them. On that basis, NRA expects the programme to keep growing at a fairly high pace.

1. By the end of 2026, the number of PDS participants may increase to 12–13 million people, up from 12.1 million contracts recorded at the start of May.
2. The volume of attracted funds may reach 1–2 trillion rubles, against 938 billion as of May 1, 2026.
3. The aggregate volume of pension reserves — the industry's total asset pool — may reach 3.2–3.3 trillion rubles by the end of 2026, preserving a high growth rate.
4. Weighted-average returns after the deduction of management rewards should remain above inflation: in the range of 9–12 percent for pension savings and 11–14 percent for pension reserves, according to NRA's forecast.

Reading the forecast range

The spread in NRA's own projection — attracted funds of anywhere between 1 and 2 trillion rubles — is as informative as its midpoint. The lower bound roughly extrapolates the current run rate of contract signings and contributions without any new policy stimulus. The upper bound implicitly assumes that at least one of the pending initiatives materialises: the maternity capital transfer mechanism, employer participation schemes, or a broadening of state co-financing. In other words, the second half of 2026 is less about marketing and more about legislation. Every month that passes without a decision on maternity capital pushes the ambitious end of the range toward 2027.

There is also a mechanical effect at work. A large share of contributions made in 2024 and 2025 has already received its first round of state co-financing, and participants who saw the state's matching ruble land in their accounts have, according to industry executives, become markedly more willing to top up. That behavioural dynamic — co-financing as a recurring demonstration of credibility — is what underpins Finam's expectation of 15–25 percent portfolio growth even before any new policy is enacted.

Employers and the children's programme: the second and third gears

Maternity capital dominates the headlines, but the NAPF monitoring shows a second driver that may prove just as important over the longer run: the employer. Sixty percent of the funds surveyed by the association name employer participation in the PDS as a significant factor in the programme's growth. The industry's proposal is to build a system in which combined corporate pension programmes can develop — arrangements where employees contribute either to a corporate pension plan or to the PDS, and receive co-financing from both the state and the employer.

The logic is straightforward. Russian companies have historically run corporate pension schemes with low participation rates because contributions felt like a distant, abstract benefit. Bolting state co-financing onto employer schemes — and letting the employee choose the PDS wrapper, with its transparent matching rules and emergency-withdrawal rights — could turn corporate programmes from a human-resources formality into a mass product. For employers, the appeal is retention: a vested long-term benefit is a stronger anchor than a marginal salary bump. For the market, every corporate ruble carries the same maturity profile as household money, which is exactly what the long-money thesis needs.

A third direction the industry considers potentially interesting is the launch of a children's PDS with state co-financing — accounts opened by parents or grandparents for a child, with the state matching contributions under the same general rules. Nedbay highlighted this as another promising avenue of development. If both the employer track and the children's track mature, the PDS stops being a product for one demographic — pre-retirees optimising tax and co-financing benefits — and becomes a family-wide savings infrastructure. That, more than any single forecast, is the strategic prize the NPFs are chasing in 2026.

Stability first: the five-year lock debate

Long products live or die by the predictability of their rules, and the industry is acutely aware of it. The foundation of the PDS's success is the immutability of the programme's conditions over a long horizon, Nedbay argues: for long-term products, stability across a five-to-ten-year window is critically important. Every reform of the 2000s and 2010s that changed the rules mid-game — freezing mandatory pension savings, shifting accumulation formulas — taught households that the state can rewrite pension contracts, and the PDS is, in part, an attempt to earn back that trust by legislating its promises.

Which is why the industry's reaction to the latest tightening proposal is so revealing. The Finance Ministry has floated increasing the term before co-financing funds can be withdrawn to five years. Rather than opposing it, the NAPF called the measure not a risk but rather a necessary medicine for the market. The reasoning is worth spelling out: under the current rules, a portion of participants treat the PDS as an enhanced deposit — contribute up to the co-financing and tax-deduction limits, then exit with the state's top-up. A five-year lock on co-financed money would make such arbitrage impractical and force the product to behave like what it was designed to be: a long-term investment instrument, not an alternative to deposits.

The trade-off is real, of course. Stricter exit rules may deter the most liquidity-sensitive savers at the margin, and the industry will be watching new-contract statistics closely after any change takes effect. But the consensus among the funds is that a smaller, genuinely long pool of money is worth more — to participants, to the funds' investment teams, and to the capital market — than a larger pool that behaves like a revolving deposit.

Risks: a narrow shelf and falling yields

Not everything in the 2026 picture is favourable. Ekaterina Serova, senior director of insurance and investment company ratings at Expert RA, emphasises that NPF investment portfolios are conservative and consist predominantly of highly reliable bonds and equities. That conservatism is a feature, not a bug — pension money should not be chasing yield down the credit curve — but it creates two structural vulnerabilities.

The first is instrument scarcity. In Serova's assessment, the most significant risks for the portfolios are the small selection of suitable investment instruments and the decline of yields following the key rate. Russia's fixed-income market, deep as it has become in government and quasi-sovereign paper, still offers a relatively thin shelf of long-dated corporate bonds, infrastructure instruments and inflation-linked products that satisfy pension-fund mandates. When trillions of rubles of new long money chase a limited set of eligible assets, the result is compression of spreads and, potentially, regulatory pressure to widen the shelf — each expansion of the permitted-instrument list carries its own risk of admitting lower-quality paper.

The second vulnerability is the rate cycle itself. A decline in the key rate is, on the one hand, an opportunity to attract new clients — as market-rate deposits and bonds reprice downward, the PDS's co-financing becomes relatively more generous — but, on the other hand, a challenge for NPF returns, as Fiveyskaya of NRA puts it. Funds that locked in double-digit yields on 2024–2025 vintages will find reinvestment progressively harder as the easing cycle proceeds. NRA nonetheless projects that weighted-average returns on pension savings and reserves, after deduction of management rewards, will remain above inflation — in the ranges of 9–12 and 11–14 percent respectively. Whether that promise survives depends less on the funds' stock-picking than on the pace of monetary easing and on how quickly the eligible-instrument shelf expands to absorb the inflows.

A subtler risk sits in the political economy of the programme. The PDS's credibility rests on the state honouring co-financing for a full ten years per participant and on the rules staying stable. Budget pressure in any given year creates a standing temptation to trim matching contributions or tighten eligibility, and each such move would land disproportionately on the households the programme is trying to recruit — younger savers and, if the maternity capital initiative passes, families with children. The industry's insistence on legislated stability is, in effect, a request to remove the programme from annual budget bargaining.

Why it matters beyond the pension industry

Zoom out from the NPF sector and the PDS story becomes a chapter in the broader transformation of Russia's capital market. Three channels connect the programme to everything else.

The first is funding. A pool of pension money measured in trillions of rubles, growing 15–30 percent a year, changes the demand side of the bond market: longer durations find natural buyers, and issuers — from the federal government to infrastructure concessionaires — gain a domestic anchor investor base that does not flee at the first volatility spike. The second channel is households' financial behaviour. The co-financing mechanic has already pulled millions of first-time institutional investors into long products; the employer and children's tracks would extend that socialisation of saving into the workplace and across generations. The third is the equity market, which is the explicit point Yuri Frants makes about maternity capital: pension mandates allocate a share of assets to equities, and a rapidly growing pension pool means structurally higher domestic demand for listed shares — relevant for an equity market that has lost much of its foreign investor base.

None of this is guaranteed. The 2026 outcome will be decided by a handful of concrete events: whether the maternity capital legislation advances toward its stated 2027 launch, whether the five-year withdrawal lock is adopted without scaring off marginal savers, whether employer co-financing schemes move from NAPF concept documents into company benefit programmes, and whether the key-rate path leaves enough yield on NPF portfolios to keep the above-inflation promise. But the direction of travel is clear. The non-state pension funds have stopped being a runoff industry and have become the most important fundraising story in Russian retail finance — and the PDS, by the end of 2026, may hold up to 2 trillion rubles of the longest money the country's households have ever entrusted to an institution.

What to watch in the second half of 2026

• The legislative track on maternity capital transfers into the PDS, which the NAPF says could start working in 2027 if agreed this year.
• The Finance Ministry's decision on extending the withdrawal lock on co-financed funds to five years — and new-contract statistics immediately afterwards.
• Pilot combined corporate-pension arrangements offering co-financing from both state and employer, the format 60 percent of funds name as a growth factor.
• Progress on the children's PDS concept with state co-financing.
• Whether attracted funds track toward the upper end of NRA's 1–2 trillion ruble range, and pension reserves toward 3.2–3.3 trillion.
• Realised returns versus the promised above-inflation ranges of 9–12 percent (savings) and 11–14 percent (reserves) as the key rate declines.

The industry's own summary of the moment is unusually undramatic and therefore credible: the PDS works because its economics are legible to an ordinary saver — put in a ruble, the state adds up to 36,000 rubles a year for a decade, and the money is protected in genuine emergencies. Everything else — the 2 trillion ruble milestone, the maternity capital windfall, the employer schemes — is an attempt to scale that legible bargain without breaking the one thing that makes it work: trust that the rules will still be the same in fifteen years.