AUTOMATIC ENROLMENT

Pensions & Retirement

In 2012 the Government introduced legislation where all UK employers are legally required to enrol qualifying employees into a workplace pension scheme. This is called ‘automatic enrolment’.

Automatic enrolment requires every employer to automatically enrol workers into a workplace pension scheme if they:

are aged between 22 and State Pension age
earn at least £10,000 a year
work in the UK

Automatic enrolment started at the beginning of October 2012 with staff who work for the biggest businesses, with others being signed up over the following six years.

The date when the law comes into effect for your company is known as your "staging date".

Your employer will be in touch around the time that they have to start automatically enrolling their workers and will explain in writing exactly how automatic enrolment will affect you.

If you’re being automatically enrolled you don’t need to do anything, unless you want to opt out. Your employer will have to make at least the minimum required contributions into your pension. You will usually have to pay in too – your contributions will be automatically taken from your pay packet.

If you aren’t eligible for automatic enrolment, then it’s up to you to decide on the next steps.

If you want to join a workplace pension scheme, you will have to tell your employer so and they cannot refuse your request.

For an overview of Workplace Pensions follow this link.

To find out what saving into a workplace pension means for your financial situation and to calculate your workplace pension contribution. follow ths link.

In order to ensure that all individuals and companies have a Pension scheme readily available to them the Government has set-up the National Employment Savings Trust (NEST) - for more information see our NEST section.

For more information Automatic Enrolment click on the appropriate links below:

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