Non-contributory social pensions - which have a long track record in southern Africa - are now being introduced in other parts of the continent. Evidence from a range of contexts suggests that pensioners in developing countries often ‘pool’ their income within the household and that, as they scale up, social pensions may have significant impacts at the household level, including on the migration choices of other household members and resource allocation within the household. Social pensions in sub-Saharan Africa may thus have distinctive effects on the migration strategies of multi-generational households as well as intra-household dynamics within ‘multi-local’ households containing migrants. However, even where the outcomes of these processes at the household level are positive overall, the effects on the wellbeing of pensioners themselves may be more complex. The roll-out of the Senior Citizens Grant (SCG) in Uganda provides an opportunity to explore these issues in a low-income sub-Saharan African context. This paper presents the initial findings from a qualitative study carried out in one district of Uganda (Kiboga) in 2017 to address the following questions: What intrahousehold effects do social pensions have on households containing migrants in Uganda? What impact does this have on the wellbeing of pensioners? Interviews were carried out with 25 recipients of the SCG and 20 migrant members of their family living elsewhere in Uganda. Households were identified through a questionnaire incorporating questions on migration used in an impact evaluation of the programme, enabling critical comparisons to be made between quantitative data collected on this issue and the more detailed responses that emerged through qualitative interviews. Households were found to be highly complex and ‘multi-local’ in character, and the pension operates alongside a varied and unstable landscape of informal forms of solidarity and support. Interviewees perceived the SCG to have little or no direct effect on migration decisions – including migrants’ choices on whether to leave children in the care of grandparents – but opinions differed between migrants and pensioners over the impact on financial remittances and other resource transfers between family members, including support for the children of migrants. In the context of high rates of in-migration to the district, pensioners’ perspectives on migration strategies at the household level – and the effect of these on their own wellbeing - were often framed by their own (positive or negative) experiences of migration.