FAQs for payroll bureaus
There are legal requirements to issue certain auto enrolment communications, usually within a specific 6-week period. The Pensions Regulator has information about this on their website.
It’s your legal duty to write to each of your workers to tell them you’re assessing, enrolling, re-enrolling or postponing assessing them. These are your employer’s auto enrolment communications.
You can ask now:pensions to manage your employer’s auto enrolment communications for you. We don’t make an extra charge for this.
If we manage these communications for you, we send them by email. We either send an email directly to the worker if you’ve given us their email address, or we send a PDF with their payroll number to the main workplace email address you’ve given us. You’ll need to forward these communications to the workers or risk a fine from The Pensions Regulator (TPR), so you must make sure this email address is monitored regularly.
Please encourage your workers to give us an up-to-date email address in now:u. This will help us to keep them informed about their workplace pension.
TPR has more guidance about your duties for auto enrolment, including communications.
Yes. We can send statutory auto enrolment communications (assessment, enrolment, and postponement letters) to your workers on your behalf. We include this as part of your service – we don’t charge you extra.
We send these communications by email.
- We’ll need up-to-date email addresses for each of your workers so we can send communications to them. You’ll need to include these in your pension data file.
- You’ll also need to give us a main workplace email address, for example in your HR or payroll department. We’ll use it to send statutory communications to workers we don’t have working email addresses for – and you’ll need to pass these communications on to those workers. Or risk a fine from The Pensions Regulator. So, you must make sure this email address is checked regularly.
Employer auto enrolment communications are the communications you must, by law, send your workers when you assess, enrol, re-enrol or postpone assessing them.
You can ask now:pensions to send the communications on your behalf.
| Assessment for enrolment | This tells your workers they’ve been assessed, but don’t qualify to be auto enrolled into now:pensions. It also tells them how to join now:pensions. |
| Enrolment notice | This tells your workers they’ve been enrolled into now:pensions and the date they were enrolled, or re-enrolled. It also explains how their payments and tax relief work, how they can opt out, and how to manage their pension online. |
| Postponement notice | This tells your workers you’ve decided to postpone assessing them for auto enrolment and gives them your deferral date – the date when you’ll assess them. It explains how workplace pensions work. It also sets out how workers qualify to be enrolled and what their options are while they’re waiting to be assessed. |
The communications we send your workers depend on the information you upload in your pension data file. For example, we won’t send postponement notices if you’re not using postponement.
We tell your workers when they’ve successfully opted in, opted out or stopped paying in to their pension savings.
Each year we send an annual benefit statement to all workers with now:pensions savings – whether they’re still paying in, or not. This gives them a snapshot of the value of their now:pensions savings at the previous 31 March. It shows:
- how much money they’ve built up in their pension savings
- how much they, and you as their workplace, have paid in
- how investment has affected the value of their pension savings
- the costs and charges that have come out of their savings during the year
- how much they could have at their retirement age if they stay in now:pensions
- what they could do to save more.
Your participation agreement has a full list of the communications we send to your workers.