DWP confirms new auto-enrolment staging dates - Jan '12

The Government has now confirmed the revised auto-enrolment timetable for smaller firms, as announced in November last year. Firms with more than 250 employees as of April 2012 are unaffected, and will be required to adopt the new rules from their respective staging dates between October 2012 and February 2014.

Medium sized firms with 50-249 employees will be allocated new staging dates as much as a year later than originally planned (see table below).

Small employers have been split into two groups - those with 30-49 employees and those with fewer than 30. The staging dates for these organisations have been pushed back by at least a year, and as much as 22 months in some cases.

These delays will also have the effect of delaying the planned increases in minimum employer contributions by a year across all employers. For example, firms that adopt the Band Earnings basis of contributions now won't have to increase their minimum contribution from 1% to 2% until October 2017.

The table below summarises the new timetable as published so far. The DWP has advised that more detailed information, presumably giving specific staging dates, will be published shortly.