Assess your staff
On the third anniversary of your duties start date, you’ll need to assess staff who have left your pension scheme, or reduced their contributions, to work out if you need to put them back into your scheme.
Any staff who are:
- aged between 22 and up to State Pension Age
- and earn over £10,000 a year, or £833 a month, or £192 a week
must be put back into your pension scheme and you must both pay into it. You cannot use postponement to delay assessing your staff.
If any of your staff fall outside of the above age and earnings criteria, then you only need to put them into a pension scheme if they ask to join one.
What if you don't have any staff to put back into your pension scheme?
You must complete and submit your re-declaration of compliance within five months of the third anniversary of your duties start date.
Already past the third anniversary of your duties start date?
The date that you assess your staff is known as your re-enrolment date. If you haven't assessed your staff within six weeks of the third anniversary of your duties start date, you can do this on any date up to three months after it. Use our re-enrolment date tool to see your available dates.
Your re-declaration deadline does not change if you choose a different date to assess your staff. This means you must complete your re-declaration of compliance within five months of the third anniversary of your duties start date.
You don’t need to tell us your re-enrolment date until we ask for this in your re-declaration of compliance.
Put your staff back into your pension scheme
You should do this within six weeks of the third anniversary of your duties start date (or the later date you chose to assess your staff).
Having worked out which staff must be put back into your pension scheme, you must now put them back in and start paying into the scheme.
You put your staff back into a pension scheme following the same process that you use to put staff into the scheme for the first time. You will need to:
- send the details of staff who are being put into a pension scheme to your pension provider promptly - you need to give your pension scheme provider all the information that they need to initially set up your staff in the pension scheme
- work out how much you both need to pay into the scheme and arrange for this to happen - find out more about making contributions to your pension scheme, payroll software may help do this for you
If you are still unsure of the process, contact your pension scheme provider.
If any of your staff choose to leave your pension scheme (opt out) within one month of being put back in, you need to stop taking money out of their pay and arrange a full refund of what has been paid to date. This must happen within one month of their request.