You can find a step-by-step guide on how to do this so you can easily manage your clients’ pensions and upload files.

Our guide can help you through this process, step-by-step.

Pension regulations say you must upload your first pension data file after your duties start date.

If you upload your first file too early – before this date – you could get errors such as:

• incorrect worker communications

• the wrong contributions being collected, or

• incorrect dates for workers’ opt-out windows.

You can do this in now:u. Follow the steps in our guide to learn more.

You set up your first payroll as part of setting your organisation up on now:u. Run through the steps on how to do this in our guide.

now:pensions is a net pay pension scheme. You, the workplace, take pension contributions out of workers’ gross pay and pay them into now:pensions before income tax is deducted.  

You’ll need to: 

• work out pension contributions on gross (before tax) pay, and 

• calculate and deduct your workers’ income tax after you’ve taken their pension contributions. 

As a result, your workers who are taxpayers won’t pay any income tax on their pension contributions. They automatically get full tax relief. 

Workers who don’t earn enough to pay tax don’t normally get tax relief. The government has set up a scheme to pay a tax top-up to these workers, so they don’t miss out. HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) will contact workers who aren’t taxpayers directly about this. Payments are expected to begin in 2026 for the 2024/25 tax year.

Self-employed workers will need to claim tax relief through their annual self-assessment tax return.

What other types of tax relief are there? 

There’s another type of tax relief arrangement called relief at source. In this kind of arrangement the workplace takes workers’ pension contributions from their pay, after income tax has been taken off. 

The pension scheme then claims the tax relief from HMRC each month, adding the basic tax rate of 20% to workers’ contributions.

Higher or additional-rate taxpayers can claim back the rest of their tax relief from HMRC through their annual Self-Assessment tax return. 

Make sure you set up your tax relief correctly

For now:pensions, you must set up your workplace pension for tax relief on the net pay basis. Otherwise, your workers’ contributions won’t be worked out correctly and you could end up having to compensate for any losses they may incur. If you’re not sure how to do this, please ask us for help using webchat.

The law requires that when you deduct contributions from your workers’ pay, you must pay these in to your workplace pension scheme no later than the 22nd day (19th if you pay by cheque) of the next month.

You must upload your pension data files in time to meet the deadline of the 22nd day of the month after your deduction date.

You use this file to import your worker and payment information into now:u. It’s a CSV file – a plain text file that lets you save data in a structured format.  

Learn how to use the pension data file in our guide.