Re-enrolment for UK pension compliance: an overview

As part of the legal obligations of having UK employees, every three years you must put certain employees back into the automatic enrolment pension scheme. This is called re-enrolment. There are two stages to this, identical to those when the employees were initially enrolled in the pension scheme. We previously outlined pensions and why employees may opt-out, here.

There are certain steps you will need to carry out to meet your re-enrolment duties.

On the third anniversary of the duties start date (staging date), you should assess employees who have left your scheme to see if they meet the age and earnings criteria to be re-enrolled. You then need to put them back into your pension scheme.

Contributions should be increased for employees who are paying below the minimum contribution levels.

These employees should be re-enrolled into the scheme if:

Any of the employees (older than 22 years but up to the state pension age) have left/opted out of the scheme since they were initially enrolled are receiving earnings before tax of more than:

• £10,000 per year,
• £833 per month or,
• £192 per week

Once you’ve done this, you must write to the employees re-enrolled, to tell them what is happening.

The second and final stage is to complete the re-declaration of compliance. This informs The Pension Regulator of how the re-enrolment duties have been met and whether any employee was put back into the scheme, or not.

The redeclaration should be done within 6 weeks of the third anniversary of your duties start date or staging date.

The Pension Regulator tool is very useful for assisting with understanding of duties and obligations.