Pension Re-enrolment 2026: What Employers Must Do Every Three Years

Re-enrolment isn’t the only pension deadline landing on employers’ desks in 2026. If you haven’t already, it’s worth reading our guide to pensions dashboards and what they mean for employers alongside this one, since the two are easy to conflate but involve entirely different duties.

Filing your Declaration of Compliance feels like the finish line, but it isn’t. Every three years, the whole process comes round again: reassessing anyone who opted out or scaled back their contributions, and putting the eligible ones back into a qualifying pension scheme. This is re-enrolment, and it has its own deadline, its own paperwork, and its own penalties if you miss it. For an SME already juggling payroll, leavers, joiners and everything else, it’s the sort of date that can sneak up without much warning.

What re-enrolment actually involves

Re-enrolment lands on the third anniversary of your original auto-enrolment duties start date, or your previous re-enrolment date if you’ve been through this before. On that date, you need to look again at anyone who opted out of your pension scheme, or dropped their contributions below the minimum, and check whether they now meet the age and earnings criteria for automatic enrolment.

There’s some flexibility on the exact date. TPR’s guidance lets employers pick any date within a six-month window, three months either side of the third anniversary. Whatever date you settle on has to apply across the board, even if you run separate payroll cycles for different groups of staff.

Who actually needs reassessing

You’re only looking at people who left the scheme or reduced their contributions. Anyone who’s stayed enrolled at or above the minimum doesn’t need a second look. For everyone else, the basic test is whether they:

• Are aged between 22 and State Pension age
• Earn more than the qualifying earnings threshold, £10,000 for the 2026/27 tax year, based on what they’re paid in the pay period that covers your re-enrolment date

There’s a useful exemption worth knowing about. Anyone who opted out, or stopped being an active member, within the 12 months before your re-enrolment date doesn’t have to be re-enrolled. You’re allowed to include them anyway if you want to, but nothing obliges you to.

Re-declaring compliance

Reassessing staff is only half of it. You then have to submit a re-declaration of compliance to The Pensions Regulator confirming what you’ve done, and this applies whether or not anyone actually needed re-enrolling. It’s due within five months of the third anniversary of your duties start date, or your last re-enrolment date, through the same online system you used for your original Declaration of Compliance.

Miss that deadline and TPR treats it exactly like missing your first declaration: a fixed penalty notice to start, with daily fines if it drags on. Re-declaration is a legal duty in its own right, quite separate from whether you had anyone to re-enrol, which is easy to overlook in a year when the reassessment itself turns out to be a non-event.

A rough timeline for HR

Most of what makes re-enrolment awkward is admin rather than anything genuinely complicated. In practice it tends to go something like this:

1. Confirm your re-enrolment date, usually the third anniversary of your duties start date unless you’ve chosen otherwise.
2. Pull together anyone who opted out or reduced contributions more than 12 months before that date.
3. Check them against the age and earnings criteria using their pay for the relevant period.
4. Re-enrol whoever meets the criteria, then write to them within six weeks explaining what’s happened and how to opt out again if that’s what they want.
5. Update payroll and let your pension provider know.
6. Submit your re-declaration of compliance within five months of your re-enrolment date.
7. Hang on to records of the assessment, communications and contributions for six years (four years for opt-out notices specifically).

Most providers, NEST and The People’s Pension among them, send reminder emails and offer tools to help work out who needs reassessing. Worth logging into your provider’s portal in good time rather than waiting for a letter from TPR to tell you it’s due.

Why this is worth more than just admin

Staff who opted out three years ago sometimes find themselves back in the pension scheme without having asked for it. That can generate a fair few questions, and occasionally a bit of irritation, if nobody’s explained why beforehand. A short, plain explanation of what re-enrolment is and why it happens, sent out before the letters land, tends to head off most of the confused emails to HR.

It’s also a decent excuse to revisit financial wellbeing education more broadly. Employees who actually understand how auto-enrolment works, including why they might end up re-enrolled after opting out, are less likely to opt straight back out on reflex and more likely to make a genuine choice about their contributions. That matters, given how low pension engagement still is among younger staff especially.

Avoiding the last-minute scramble

Re-enrolment isn’t complicated in itself, but it’s the sort of thing that gets missed, particularly at smaller businesses without a dedicated payroll or pensions person. Putting your re-enrolment window in the diary as soon as your duties start date is confirmed, and taking the re-declaration deadline as seriously as your first Declaration of Compliance, heads off nearly all of the risk.

Aspina’s platform gives SMEs plain English, trackable pension training that can explain re-enrolment to staff before it happens, plus completion reports HR can keep on file. Have a look at our FAQs for more detail, or get in touch if you’d like a hand preparing your team for the next cycle.