Auto-enrolment pension rules have been around for a decade now. If you employ staff in your business, you should already be familiar with them.
The rules make it compulsory to enrol staff over a certain age and income into a workplace pension scheme, with a minimum level of employer and employee contributions.
But your responsibilities don’t end there – another key part of auto-enrolment is the process of re-enrolment, which must be done every three years.
Here’s what you need to know.
What is pension re-enrolment?
Pension re-enrolment is the requirement for employers to put certain members of staff who have left their pension scheme back into it every three years.
You’ll also need to re-declare your compliance with the rules to the Pensions Regulator. This is the case even if it turns out you don’t need to re-enrol anyone.
This is an important task and not one to be missed – if you fail to meet the re-enrolment rules or miss a deadline, you could face a fine.
What do you need to do?
The steps you need to take will depend on a few different factors. You can work out your specific duties by answering a questionnaire on the Pensions Regulator website, but we’ve provided a brief summary here.
1) Re-enrol staff
Your first main step is to work out whether you have staff you need to re-enrol. Staff are included in auto-enrolment if they:
- are aged between 22 and the state pension age
- earn more than £10,000 a year (£833 a month, or £192 a week).
If any of your staff have dropped out of their pension scheme or reduced their contributions, and they fit the above criteria, you’ll need to re-enrol them.
You should do this on the third anniversary of your duties start date or staging date (when you first started complying with auto-enrolment).
You’ll also need to write to the employees you’ve re-enrolled to let them know what you’re doing. You can use a template letter or ask your pension provider to do it on your behalf. Either way, this needs to be done within six weeks of the third anniversary of your duties start date or staging date.
2) Re-declare compliance
The second step of re-enrolment is to re-declare to the Pensions Regulator that you’re complying with your legal duties under auto-enrolment.
This needs to be done within five months of the third anniversary of your duties start date or staging date.
Again, you can do this through the Pensions Regulator website or ask your accountant or adviser to do it for you.
Talk to us
Assessing your staff, setting them up again and re-declaring your compliance can be a time-consuming task, but it’s important to get it right.
As part of our payroll service, we can manage the end-to-end process on your behalf and keep you in line with all the rules of auto-enrolment.
Get in touch to find out more.