How do I prepare for enrolling workers?

When to enrol?

You will need to assess your workers and determine when they should be enrolled in the Nest pension scheme.

Your legal duties begin from the day you employ your first worker, this is known as your duties start date. UK pension rules allow you to defer putting your workers into an auto-enrolment pension scheme for up to 3 months, provided you tell them within 6 weeks of your duty start date. This is called postponement. If you do this, a worker could ask to be put into the scheme and if they qualify then you are required to put them in straight away.

If you don’t use postponement, then the workers need to be assessed in the first pay period in which your duty start date falls and if they qualify, put into the scheme.

You can apply the same process for new starters – either choosing to defer putting them into the pension scheme for up to 3 months or putting them in straight away.

Once you have started, you need to assess each worker who is not in the pension scheme each pay period and determine if they qualify to join. If they do, you are allowed to postpone their start date by up to 3 months. But again, you must notify them in writing that you are doing this within 6 weeks of the date they qualify.

Assessing workers

On your duties start date, you must work out how much each worker earns and how old they are, this is known as assessing your workers. Please see Who do I need to enrol? for more information.

Informing workers

By law, you’ll need to send out written information about automatic enrolment to every worker, whichever category they’re in. This includes workers you’re not enrolling, for example, those who don’t have qualifying earnings.

Helpful communication templates

We provide a range of employer notice templates that cover the different types of notice you may need to send to the workers in your business. The notices included are in Word format and are templates to make it easier for you to copy and paste the content. You’ll still need to add in the details that are specific to your business and workers before you send them. You can find these templates within our guides for when setting up your scheme for the first time, when enrolling a new worker and at your re-enrolment date.