To set up an account for an employee, you must enrol them. There are two options: contractual enrolment or automatic enrolment. Automatic enrolment means that, as an employer, you perform an assessment of your workforce every pay period and you need to enrol anyone into the workplace pension (after a period of postponement if you choose to have this in place) who meets the following criteria:
- Age 22 to State Pension age; and
- Are a UK worker
- Earns over the threshold set by the Pensions Regulator
More information on the thresholds set by the Pensions Regulator for earnings is available at the Pensions Regulator website.
If you are automatically enrolling employees to Cushon Master Trust then you must issue particular communications to them as part of this process.
The specific automatic enrolment communications are explained here.
Contractual enrolment is where membership of your workplace pension is written into employees’ contracts, which means they join the workplace pension when they are employed, so they do not need to meet the criteria in place for automatic enrolment.