Over the festive season, employers across a range of industries turn to seasonal workers to help them cope with extra customer demand. Retail, delivery and hospitality businesses in particular may all need extra staff to make the yuletide pay.

Alongside getting sufficient staff in place to cope with the flurry of pre-holiday spending, followed by Boxing Day and New Year sales, employers need to remember their auto-enrolment responsibilities for any seasonal staff they take on.

What does auto-enrolment involve for seasonal workers?

Auto-enrolment has to be considered for staff from age 22 to state pension age who earn over £192 per week or £833 per month, unless they have opted out. It creates a legal obligation on employers to:

• operate a workplace pension scheme,
• ensure that eligible jobholders are enrolled, and
• make at least the minimum level of contributions to it, for both employer and employee.

We covered some further specifics of auto-enrolment in a previous edition of Employer Focus, including the required minimum contributions.

Auto-enrolment responsibilities apply to seasonal and temporary workers just as they do to permanent staff. The challenge with seasonal workers is that they may start or end their employment in the middle of a pay cycle, have variable wages and hours, and/or only work for short periods of time.

To help employers comply with the rules, the Pensions Regulator provides some helpful guides on managing auto-enrolment for:

• Employing seasonal or temporary staff
• Staff employed on irregular hours or incomes
• Assessing staff whose hours and pay varies

Two ways of helping to manage these obligations as recommended by the Regulator include:

• Software – most software will help make the assessment about who needs to be in or out of auto-enrolment, so choosing the appropriate software to your circumstances is key.
• Postponement – this allows employers to defer making decisions about whether or not an employee needs to be enrolled for a period of three months. This can be helpful for seasonal workers, as it allows a decision to be taken when more details about their overall earnings and hours are known.  However, workers must be advised in writing that postponement is being applied to them.

This article reflects the position at the date of publication shown above. If you are reading this at a later date you are advised to check that that position has not changed in the time since.  

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