All UK employers are required to provide and contribute to a workplace pension scheme. If you’re aged between 22 and state pension age, and you’re earning £10,000 or more, we must automatically enrol you onto our pension scheme once you’ve been employed for three months.
The minimum contribution is 8% of your salary, at least 3% of which must be an employer contribution.
If you fall outside the criteria, you may be able to join the scheme if you choose, but you won’t be automatically enrolled.
You can choose to opt out if you want to, but only after you’ve been enrolled. As with everything we do for our employees, our pension scheme is carefully chosen and we’d advise you to take a look at the scheme and make a deliberate decision about whether you want to join.
Members of our pension scheme can access their pension info and make decisions about how their money is invested using the Pay and Pensions section of the Orange Genie Companion portal. This ensures your information is secure, and gives you access at any time from any device.
Salary sacrifice
We’ve never been content to do the legal minimum, so as well as providing a workplace pension scheme we can also help you contribute to a pension of your choice via salary sacrifice. As the name suggests, this is where you give up part of your salary in return for a benefit – in this case, a contribution to your pension. Because your contribution comes out of your pre-tax salary, you don’t pay income tax or National Insurance on your contributions.
| A £100 pension contribution costs |
Basic rate tax payer | £68 |
Higher rate tax payer | £58 |
Additional rate tax payer | £53 |
If you use our salary sacrifice option, it will be a 100% employer contribution, which means it comes out of the income we receive from your client or agency before our employment costs are calculated. This further reduces the cost, as we don’t have to pay Employer’s NI or Apprenticeship Levy on the contributions.