By law, the total minimum contributions you must pay into your employees’ workplace pension schemes increase on 6 April 2019. You need to be ready for this increase, to make sure you are paying the correct amounts into your staff’s schemes.
Are you ready?
From 6 April, the total minimum contribution including employer and employee payments must be no less than 8% of qualifying earnings. You must pay a minimum of 3%, with the employees making up the rest of the 8%.
You can choose to pay more than their 3% minimum contribution if you wish. If you do, your staff won’t need to pay in as much to meet the total minimum contribution of 8% of qualifying earnings.
| Date effective | Total minimum contribution | Employer minimum contribution | Staff contribute the remainder |
| Current rates | 5% | 2% | Up to 3% |
| 6 April 2019 | 8% | 3% | Up to 5% |
You should be ready to calculate contributions using the new rates the first time you pay your employees from 6 April.
Next steps
- it should be simple for the new rates to be applied, but you should prepare now by contacting your payroll and software service providers to make sure their systems are ready
- we recommend that you write to their staff to let them know about the increase in contributions
Please note, if you already contribute more than the total minimum of 8% into your employees’ workplace pension schemes or use a defined benefit (DB) scheme for automatic enrolment, you don’t need to take any action. And if any of your staff asked to be put into a scheme that you don’t pay into, the increases don’t apply to them.
