The festive season is a magical time, but for employers, it’s also one of the busiest. With increased demand, many businesses turn to temporary workers to handle the holiday rush. However, when it comes to payroll, temporary doesn’t mean exempt. Auto enrolment duties for pensions still apply, even for staff who only work for a few days, weeks, or months. If this is your first time hearing about this, you may be wondering “Well, how do I know if they’re eligible or not?” Don’t worry, the rules around auto enrolment for temporary employees shouldn’t be adding to your stress this festive season.
A lot of time, employers have to staff individually (and every time you pay them, mind you!) to work out if they need to be put into a pension scheme. It doesn’t matter if they’re on irregular hours or earning varying incomes – for auto enrolment, they have to be aged 22 to state pension age and earn over £192 a week (or £833 a month).
Essentially, this means that any Christmas casuals earning above the threshold must be enrolled. It’s crucial to fulfil your auto enrolment duties, as failing to do so could lead to penalties and fines.
And while we get that managing auto enrolment might sound complicated, if you use our cloud payroll software, BrightPay, this isn’t an issue. We have auto enrolment functionality built into the system to make the process much easier. Setting up a pension scheme, enrolling employees, issuing communication, making contributions and producing reports is all seamless and simple. This gives you peace of mind that you’re staying on top of your duties, and ticks off one extra thing on your Christmas to-do list!
How BrightPay helps with auto enrolment for temporary employees
Here’s how BrightPay can support you with auto enrolment for temporary employees.
1. Checks employee eligibility for you
Say goodbye to manually assessing staff on an individual basis – when you use BrightPay, it’s all done in the background for you. The software uses your temporary Christmas employees’ (and all employees for that matter!) age and income to determine their eligibility for auto enrolment. BrightPay repeats this check each pay period, ensuring you stay informed of any updates or changes to your employees’ eligibility throughout the Christmas period.
2. Informs you an employee needs to be enrolled
BrightPay takes care of the guesswork by notifying you whenever auto-enrolment duties are required. Whether it’s enrolling a single employee or a large batch of seasonal hires, BrightPay makes it painless and efficient. You can even bulk-enrol multiple employees at the same time to save even more time.
3. Prepares enrollment letters
BrightPay goes beyond just enrolling employees, it also creates their personalised enrolment letters. These can be printed, exported as a PDF or emailed diretly to them. Just to note that non-eligible jobholders, entitled workers and postponed employees must also receive a letter to inform them of their rights and explain how auto enrolment applies to them.
4. Pension provider integration
With BrightPay, you can send contribution and enrolment files from BrightPay directly to their pension provider’s portal, so no more exporting and uploading files! We’ve got direct integration with NEST, The People’s Pension and Smart Pension. Also, for employees who are enrolled into a NEST pension, you can check and approve payment amounts from BrightPay too.
The benefits of using BrightPay cloud this Christmas and for 2025
Moving to our fully cloud payroll software comes with a host of time-saving benefits beyond auto enrolment. Its intuitive, cloud-based design means you can process payroll anytime, from anywhere, and through any device, which is ideal for those of you who are juggling extra holiday demands! Some of these time-saving benefits include:
- Real-time updates: Changes are made instantly to a payroll file, while you work, with the ability to view updates from anywhere.
- Multi-user access: BrightPay takes payroll collaboration to the next level, as multiple people can access and work the same payroll file together. Also, these changes are made instantly, while you all work, offering seamless teamwork.
- Smart integrations: BrightPay is has direct integration with leading bookkeeping software and a payment platform to streamline your payroll processing even further.
- Automatic updates: Always stay compliant with the latest legislation without lifting a finger. We ensure that you’re always using the latest version of the software and run these updates in the background without any interruption to your workflow.
With BrightPay, you have everything you need to ensure your payroll runs smoothly, no matter how hectic the Christmas rush gets. Check out a quick demo below and discover how we can simplify auto enrolment and payroll management for your business.
