Managing your workplace pension

Helping you run your workplace pension to make it as simple as possible

Who to enrol

You need to automatically enrol anyone who meets the following criteria. Employees who:

are aged between 22 years old and under State Pension age
earn more than £10,000 a year (for the current tax year)
work in the UK.

Any employee who falls outside of this, can ask to be enrolled. If they do ask, you won’t need to pay contributions on their behalf, but you can if you want.

Contributions

How much you need to pay in

The level of contributions that need to be paid is usually based on your employees’ qualifying earnings.

You don’t pay anything on the first £6,240 they earn a year, or on anything they earn above £50,270 a year. What you do pay is at least 3% of any earnings in between those 2 figures.

So, if they earn £16,240 a year, you have to pay at least 3% of £10,000. These payments are known as ‘contributions’ and a minimum contribution amount is set by the government each year.

Some employers use a different earnings basis type.

Minimum pension contributions

As an employer, you have to make the ‘Employer minimum contribution’ shown below, and then the total contribution is reached by adding the employee’s contribution (deducted from their earnings) and tax relief from the government.

However, if you wish you can choose to pay the full amount yourself, so your employees don’t have to.

Employer minimum contribution	Employee contribution	Tax relief on employee contribution	Total minimum contribution
3%	4%	1%	8%

These percentages can vary if an employer calculates contributions using different elements of pay. You can find out more about calculating pension contributions on The Pensions Regulator (TPR) website.

Different contribution levels

Although 3% is the minimum you have to contribute, you can pay in more if you want. You can choose to do this for all employees or for different grades and positions.

This can all be managed within your Online Services account.

Opt-outs and re-enrolment

What to do about employees who opt out

If an employee is automatically enrolled but doesn’t want to join, then they can opt out. If they do so within 1 calendar month, we’ll refund their contributions to you and you’ll need to pass the money back to them.

If they leave after 1 calendar month, then they’re ‘ceasing active membership’ and they won’t qualify for a refund. Any money paid in will stay invested.

But wait, there’s re-enrolment to think about

Every 3 years the government wants to put employees who’ve opted out, ceased active membership or reduced their contributions to below the minimum level, back into a pension scheme. It’s a process called re-enrolment.

Even if you don’t need to re-enrol any employees, you still need to re-declare your compliance.

Watch our video for an overview of re-enrolment.

Here’s how to re-enrol any employees

1. Choose your re-enrolment date

You can choose any date in a 6-month window, centred on the 3rd anniversary of your last re-enrolment date. This can be 3 months prior to or 3 months after the 3rd anniversary of your duties start date. On this date your payroll, HR and software processes must be ready to go.

Make sure you tell us your re-enrolment date. If you don’t, our system may stop you uploading your employee data.

The date you choose will be the centre point of your re-enrolment window in 3 years’ time.

2. Re-enrol your employees

It’s easy to re-enrol your employees using your Online Services account.

Your employees must be re-enrolled on the re-enrolment date.

The exact process depends on how you assess employee pension contributions.

Assesment

Do we assess your employees for you?

If so, you’ll need to prepare your employee data so we know who needs to be assessed for re-enrolment.

On the submission of employee data before your re-enrolment date, please include the employees who need to be re-assessed for re-enrolment and include ‘RE’ in the ‘Starter/Leaver Flag’ column (you must ensure this is mapped when uploading your file).

We’ll assess them under auto-enrolment rules and re-enrol those who are assessed as ‘eligible’
You can then remove the ‘RE’ flag on your next submission.

Do you use a payroll provider to assess your employees?

If so, check whether your payroll provider will be able to manage re-enrolment for you.

They may be managing the process for you automatically, but you’ll still need to re-declare your compliance with The Pensions Regulator (TPR).
Your payroll provider can assess which of your employees are eligible jobholders out of those who’ve stopped contributing. They’ll let us know which of your employees should be re-enrolled.

You may need to advise them to add a new auto-enrolment date to the data file for each employee you need to re-enrol.
You may also need to advise your payroll provider on whether you want to re-enrol any of your exempt employees.

Do you assess your employees manually?

If so, you’ll need to check your employee data includes everyone who should be re-enrolled.

You’ll need to add any employees that need to be re-enrolled when you submit your employee data to us.
You, or your payroll provider, will still need to continue ongoing assessment of all your employees as usual to keep their pension contributions accurate.

3. Tell your employees

It’s important you keep your employees up to date with what’s happening – it could come as a bit of a surprise that they’re being re-enrolled. Would you like help to communicate re-enrolment news with your employees?

Within 6 weeks of your re-enrolment date, we’ll write to your workers to make sure they understand their workplace pension – including that they have 1 calendar month to opt out.

4. Re-declare your compliance with The Pensions Regulator

You’re legally required to re-declare your compliance on The Pensions Regulator (TPR) website to show you’ve complied with your employer duties.
If you don’t complete it in time, you may be fined.

You have to re-declare within 5 months of the 3-year anniversary of your duties start date, or your previous re-enrolment date and once you’ve assessed and re-enrolled your employees (even if you have no one to re-enrol).

You’ll need to include details of yourself, the company, PAYE schemes and your workforce, as well as our details:

Workplace pension scheme
Pension scheme name – The People’s Pension Scheme
Pension scheme provider address – Manor Royal, Crawley, West Sussex, RH10 9QP
PSRN – 12005993

When you’ve submitted your re-declaration to The Pensions Regulator, they’ll send you an acknowledgement letter. This completes your re-enrolment duties until your next re-enrolment window in around 3 years.

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