The declaration of compliance is the return that proves you have done auto-enrolment properly. It has to reach The Pensions Regulator within five months of your duties starting, and a fresh re-declaration is due every three years after that. Miss either and the Regulator treats it as a breach. We complete the declaration in full, submit it before the deadline, and track the three-yearly cycle, so it is one duty you never have to think about. This page explains what the declaration is, what it confirms, the deadlines that apply, and how we handle it for you.
What a declaration of compliance is
When you employ staff, you have legal duties under automatic enrolment: to assess your workers, put the eligible ones into a qualifying workplace pension, and pay into it. Thedeclaration of compliance is how you prove toThe Pensions Regulator that you have actually done all of that. It is an online return, made through the Regulator's website, in which you confirm the steps you have taken and give the figures that back them up.
It is important to be clear about what the declaration is and is not. It is not the act of setting up a pension scheme, and it is not the same as paying contributions. Those are separate duties. The declaration is the formal statement, after the fact, that says "here is how we met our auto-enrolment obligations". Even a business that has set up its scheme perfectly and paid every contribution on time has still not finished until the declaration is submitted. It is the piece employers most often overlook, precisely because the hard work of enrolling people feels like the end of the job.
Every employer with at least one member of staff has to complete a declaration, and in most cases that is true even where nobody turned out to be eligible for enrolment. The Regulator wants a positive confirmation of your position, not silence. We treat the declaration as part of the same job as the enrolment itself, so it is never left as a loose end.
What the declaration confirms
The declaration of compliance asks you to confirm a set of specific facts about how you met your duties. The exact fields can be refined by The Pensions Regulator over time, but in practice you are confirming things such as:
- The PAYE scheme and details the duties relate to.
- How many people you employ, and how many were put into a pension.
- The pension scheme you used and its reference details.
- Whether any staff were already in a qualifying scheme.
- The contact details the Regulator should hold for you.
Getting these figures right matters, because the declaration is a legal statement. The numbers have to match what actually happened in your payroll and your pension scheme. Because we run your auto-enrolment assessment each pay period, we already hold the accurate figures the declaration needs, so there is no scramble to reconstruct them and nothing to guess at.
The five-month deadline
The single most important thing to know about the declaration is the deadline. You must submit itwithin five months of your duties start date. Your duties start date is generally the day your automatic enrolment obligations began, which for most employers is the day their first member of staff started work. That is the day the five-month clock begins, and it is a different date from the day you set up your scheme or ran your first pay run.
This is where employers get caught out. Setting up a pension and enrolling staff can take a good part of that window, so by the time the scheme is running it can feel as if there is plenty of time left, when in fact the deadline is closer than it looks. The five months does not pause while you get organised, and it does not extend because you were busy. Treating the declaration as the final, unmissable step of setting up auto-enrolment is the safest way to think about it.
Count from your duties start date, not your set-up date. The five months runs from the day your auto-enrolment duties began. We work out that date for you and file your declaration well inside the window, so the deadline is met without you having to watch the calendar.
Re-declaration of compliance every three years
The declaration is not a one-off. Every three years you have a separate duty calledre-enrolment, and it comes with its own return: there-declaration of compliance. Around each third anniversary of your original duties, you have to look again at certain staff, typically those who previously opted out or left the scheme, put the eligible ones back in, and then submit a fresh declaration confirming you have done so.
The re-declaration is due within a set window around your re-enrolment date, and The Pensions Regulator treats a missed re-declaration exactly as it treats a missed first declaration. It is easy to forget, because three years is a long gap and the original set-up feels like ancient history by then. Businesses change hands, staff who ran payroll move on, and the re-enrolment date slips past unnoticed. We track your three-year cycle from the start, carry out the re-enrolment exercise when it falls due, and submit your re-declaration on time, so the anniversary is never a nasty surprise.
What happens if you miss it
The Pensions Regulator has real powers to enforce the declaration and re-declaration duties. If a declaration is late or missing, the Regulator can issue a compliance notice telling you to put things right, and can follow that with financial penalties if the duty is still not met. For persistent or serious breaches, penalties can be fixed or can escalate on a daily basis until you comply, with the amounts depending on the size of your workforce.
We describe the practice rather than promising an outcome: the way to stay clear of any of this is simply to complete an accurate declaration and submit it inside the deadline, and to do the same for each three-yearly re-declaration. That is exactly the routine we run for our clients, so enforcement action is something we help you avoid rather than something you have to fear.
How we complete and submit it for you
Your declaration of compliance is built into the auto-enrolment service we run as part of your payroll, so there is nothing extra for you to arrange. Because we assess your staff every pay period and manage your pension scheme alongside your payroll, we already hold the accurate figures the declaration needs. We complete the return in full, submit it to The Pensions Regulator inside the five-month window, confirm to you that it is done, and keep a record of it for your files.
We then track your three-year cycle so your re-enrolment and re-declaration are handled automatically when they fall due, without you having to remember a date that is years away. It sits alongside our wider auto-enrolment and pensions service, which covers assessment, enrolment, contributions and re-enrolment as one joined-up job.
We are a South Wales payroll bureau with more than 60 years of combined experience, and many of our clients have been with us since 2006. We are CIPP members and Chartered Accountants (ICAEW), and we are ICO registered and Cyber Essentials certified, so your pension duties and your employees' data are in careful, accredited hands. If you want your declaration of compliance completed and filed on time, this year and every re-enrolment after, talk to us about your payroll or see how our pricing works.