THE LONG-AWAITED auto-enrolment pension scheme will begin collecting contributions from today but employees are being warned about the potential for “teething troubles” in the early days of the scheme. 

The government scheme is being called MyFutureFund and has been initiated to target the over 760,000 workers in Ireland who do not currently have access to a work or personal pension. 

Under the scheme, if you’re aged between 23 and 60, earning over €20,000 a year, and an employee without pension contributions being paid through payroll, you’ll be automatically ‘auto-enrolled’ into the pension fund. 

After six months, you can choose to leave the scheme and get a refund of your pension contributions.

It is being administered by a new authority, the National Automatic Enrolment Retirement Savings Authority (NAERSA), which is being headed up by former National Lottery CEO Dermot Griffin. 

The Department of Social Protection has said that the MyFutureFund participant portal is also live from today, which should allow employees use their MyGovID to see their own contributions to the scheme as well as contributions from employers and the government.  

However, the department has cautioned that there may be a lag of up to ten days in employees seeing contributions being deducted from their payslips and appearing in their participant portal, as the funds make their way through banks. 

What does it mean?

Under the auto-enrolment pension scheme, for every €3 an employee contributes, their employer will add another €3 while the state will top it up by €1.

In an example published today, the department says that, for a 25-year-old employee working full-time on minimum wage, they will be earning €29,432 gross per year and will begin by contributing 1.5% of their gross pay which is €8.49 every week.

“Their employer will match this and the State will then top this up by an additional €2.83, resulting in a total contribution of €19.81 every week. Following the deduction of the admin fee of 55 cent, €19.26 will go straight into the participant’s account to be invested. That means that an employee contribution of €8.49 will become €19.26 even before it is invested.,” the department states.  

Over the course of a year, this employee will have contributed €441.48 towards their MyFutureFund retirement savings account, but the account will have automatically grown to €1,001.52 even before investment returns are added in.

Employer registration

Employers are obliged to participate in the scheme if they have employees that are eligible for it and face penalties for not meeting their obligations. 

Concerns have been raised that employers have been slow to register for the scheme, with an estimate last month that around 24,400 employers have registered out of the approximate 85,000 employers that have eligible staff. 

The department has not given a precise number of the employers now registered but has said that “the vast majority” has now done so. This suggests there has been an upsurge in registrations but that there is still some way to go before all employers are registered. 

In a warning to tardy employers, the department said today: 

There is no advantage to delaying registration as contributions will become due from the first payrolls of 2026 regardless of whether the employer has registered or not. 

“Therefore, not registering simply results in an employer building up a legal debt and running the risk of being subjected to compliance action by the NAERSA”

Echoing the department’s words that the first payroll of this year will be the acid test for the new scheme, Irish Congress of Trade Unions general secretary Owen Reidy said it is the most significant change in the history of the state pension. 

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“The 20-year wait since government first proposed to start auto-enrolling workers into a workplace pension is highly regrettable, but unions welcome that hundreds of thousands of workers will start 2026 with access to a pension to save for a more comfortable retirement,” he said. 

This is the most significant social intervention to protect older people’s living standards since the Old Age Pensions Act of 1908 introduced the state pension. 

He added: “While the 1st January is Day 1 for auto-enrolment, D-Day will be when the first pay packets of the new year land later in the month. Saving into a pension will be a big behavioural change for lots of workers and, given the large numbers of workers and employers coming under the scope of auto-enrolment, teething troubles can be expected in the early days.”

Speaking today, Minister for Social Protection Dara Calleary said today was the “culmination of years of hard work”.

“MyFutureFund will benefit millions of hardworking people over the coming years and decades, making sure they have more money in retirement than they otherwise would,” he said.

“For employers, it means two things, firstly they can look after their employees without having to set up and administer a pension scheme. NAERSA will do the heavy lifting when it comes to admin. And secondly, they can improve their competitiveness in what is an increasingly tight and international labour market.”

Fine Gael chair of the Oireachtas Social Protection Committee, John Paul O’Shea TD said that at present “too many workers” are reliant on the state pension alone. 

“Auto-enrolment changes that by ensuring most workers will automatically start saving for retirement,” he said.

“Families can plan for the future knowing that retirement savings are being built consistently, while employers share responsibility in supporting their staff’s financial wellbeing.”