HMRC’s latest Employer Bulletin contains a reminder about auto-enrolment and festive workers. What do you need to be aware of if you take on seasonal staff?
If you employ short-term staff for the festive season who are not on regular hours or incomes and are being paid through a payroll system, auto-enrolment legal duties may apply to you. This includes staff who work for a few days, weeks or months – like those often taken on over Christmas. To recap, any staff who are aged from 22 to state pension age and earn over £192 per week or £833 per month, must be put into a pension scheme which you must contribute towards as the employer.
To avoid this being cumbersome, if you know that any of your staff will be working for you for less than three months, you can choose to delay working out who to put into a pension scheme. This is known as postponement. Within six weeks from the date after postponement starts, you must write to staff individually to tell them what you are doing and how automatic enrolment applies to them.
During any staff member’s period of postponement, you won’t need to put them into a pension scheme generally. However, you may need to if they expressly ask to be put into one.
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