Assessing your workers - transcript

Hello, I’m Helen and I work at NEST.

Your workers will be affected in different ways by the government’s new pension reforms, and you’ll need to understand what rights they have.

So here’s what you need to do-:

• An initial assessment before your staging date
• Then a further assessment on the staging date itself
• And a reassessment every pay period

The initial assessment you do as your staging date approaches is really important. It allows you to identify which of your workers need to be automatically enrolled.

Not all your workers will be automatically enrolled. It depends on their age, earnings and whether or not they usually work in the UK. When you come to enrol your workers into NEST, you’ll need to tell us what type kind of worker they are, and what they’re entitled to. The three most common types are:

• ‘Eligible jobholder’
• ‘Non-eligible jobholder’
• or ‘Entitled workers’ (also known as ‘Worker without qualifying earnings’).

Let’s say Carly works for you -

Carly earns more than £10,000 a year; she’s older than 22 but not old enough for a State Pension. That makes her an ‘eligible jobholder’ and means she’s eligible for automatic enrolment.

Jake, on the other hand, earns less than £5,772 a year. So he’s a ‘worker without qualifying earnings’. That means if he asks to join your pension scheme you do have to enrol him, but you don’t have to pay employer contributions for him.

You can find out a lot more on how to assess your workers on our website.

When your staging date arrives, or when you reach the end of your waiting period, you’ll need to assess Carly, Jake, and everyone who works for you again. This is to make sure all the information you have is up to date and complete.

You’ll also need to make sure you enrol any eligible jobholders within six weeks of your staging date. And don’t forget to tell them what’s happening before you enrol them.

There’s more about this in our next video Enrolling your workers.

Once you’re up and running, you should reassess your workers every pay period.

Look out for workers who decide to opt out or stop contributions, as well as those that need to be enrolled.

And remember, there are enrolment deadlines. It’s up to you to assess each worker and tell them about their new pension rights in time to meet them.

Watch our Contributions and Opt-outs video for more information.

And you can always find more answers on our website.