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.
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.
If you’d like a full breakdown of how auto-enrolment thresholds work – including qualifying earnings, contribution bands, and examples of how the rules apply in payroll – you can read our auto-enrolment thresholds guide.
Opt-outs and re-enrolment
If you need to understand what happens when an employee decides to opt out, or how to handle your legal duties, take a look at our page on opt outs and re-enrolement.
Use Online Services
You can manage your workplace pension with your Online Services account. This includes setting up your employees and their data, managing leavers and opt outs, payments, refunds and more.
