Auto-Enrolment Services. Done right.

You must automatically enrol any member of staff who is aged between 22 and State Pension age and earns at least 10,000 a year, according to gov.uk. These workers are called eligible jobholders, and the duty to enrol them applies from the day they meet both tests, not from the start of the next tax year.

Staff who fall outside those limits still have rights. A worker aged 16 to 74 who earns above the lower earnings level but under 10,000 is a non-eligible jobholder: you do not have to enrol them, but they can ask to opt in and you must then contribute. Someone earning below the lower earnings level is an entitled worker, who can ask to join a scheme, though you are not obliged to contribute for them. We reassess every member of staff each pay run, because a pay rise, a bonus or extra overtime can push a non-eligible jobholder over the 10,000 trigger and create a new enrolment duty overnight.

This matters most for businesses with variable-hours or seasonal staff. A worker on the margin can move between categories several times a year, and each move has to be actioned in the right pay period. Our auto-enrolment services run that assessment for you, so nobody is enrolled late and nobody is missed.

The legal minimum is a total contribution of 8% of an employee's qualifying earnings, of which you as the employer must pay at least 3% and the employee makes up the rest, normally 5% including their tax relief, according to gov.uk. Crucially, those percentages do not apply to the whole salary. They apply only to the slice of pay that falls inside the qualifying earnings band, which runs from 6,240 to 50,270 a year for 2026/27.

That band is why a quick mental estimate of 3% of gross salary almost always overstates your cost. Take an employee on 30,000 a year. Their qualifying earnings are 30,000 minus 6,240, which is 23,760. Your 3% employer contribution is 712.80 a year, or about 59 a month, not the 900 you would get from 3% of the full 30,000. Getting the band right is the single most common payroll error we correct when a new client comes across.

Our auto-enrolment services include that calculation as standard. If you want the exact monthly figure for your own payroll rather than an estimate, book a free Tax Health Check and we will model it against your real staff list in 30 minutes.

If you miss a duty, The Pensions Regulator can issue a fixed penalty notice followed by escalating daily fines that grow with the size of your workforce, and it can order you to backdate the contributions you should have paid, including the share the employee would have paid, with no way to recover that money from your staff. The common triggers are enrolling an eligible jobholder late, missing the deadline to complete your Declaration of Compliance, or simply paying contributions across to the provider after the statutory date.

None of these failures are deliberate in practice. They happen because auto-enrolment assessment lives in payroll, the declaration deadline lives in a Regulator letter, and the two are handled by different people or different software. When a worker crosses the 10,000 trigger in month three but nobody reassesses until the year end, the breach has already happened.

Our auto-enrolment services close that gap by running assessment, contribution and declaration as one process attached to payroll. Every pay run reassesses the workforce, contributions reconcile to the deductions, and the declaration and triennial re-declaration sit in our calendar rather than your inbox. That is what penalty protection by design means: the deadlines are met because the work that drives them is never separated from the payroll that creates them.

An enrolled worker can choose to opt out, but only after they have been enrolled, and they have a one-month window from enrolment to do so and get a full refund of anything already deducted. After that window closes, they can still stop paying in, but those contributions stay in their pension rather than being refunded. You cannot encourage or induce anyone to opt out, and doing so is itself a breach the Regulator takes seriously, so the process has to be handled at arm's length and properly recorded.

Opting out is not permanent. Roughly every three years you must carry out re-enrolment, which means putting eligible staff who previously opted out back into the scheme, and then completing a re-declaration of compliance to confirm you have done it. Workers can opt out again, but the duty to re-enrol them resets each cycle. Miss the re-declaration and you are exposed to the same penalty regime as a first-time failure.

Our auto-enrolment services process opt-out notices inside the refund window, action the refunds through payroll, keep the audit trail the law requires for six years, and diarise your re-enrolment and re-declaration dates so the three-yearly cycle never catches you out.

A workplace pension provider such as NEST runs the scheme, but it does not check who must be enrolled, work out contributions on the right earnings band, or file your Declaration of Compliance. That assessment and paperwork stays with you as the employer, and it is where most penalties begin.

This is why employers use auto enrolment accountants rather than leaving it to the provider. Our auto-enrolment services assess your staff every pay run, calculate the contributions, send the statutory letters, and file the declarations, all joined up with your payroll so nothing falls through the gap between two systems. One named, qualified accountant owns it from end to end, not a call centre.

Worried about the cost of help? Our auto enrolment accountants fees sit inside a fixed monthly plan, so the work is included rather than billed by the hour or by the payslip.