UK Auto-Enrolment contribution amounts.
Total annual contribution
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Your contribution
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Employer's contribution
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Your breakdown
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How the workplace pension minimum is built
Auto-enrolment is the system that automatically puts most employees into a workplace pension. The legal minimum total contribution is 8 percent, made up of at least 3 percent from the employer and the balance, usually 5 percent, from the employee, which includes the tax relief the government adds. The catch that surprises people is the base those percentages run on. By default the minimum is calculated only on a slice of pay called qualifying earnings, which for 2026/27 runs from £6,240 up to £50,270. Pay below the lower figure and above the upper figure is ignored.
This calculator does exactly that. It takes your salary, clips it to the £6,240 to £50,270 band, then applies your employee and employer percentages to the clipped figure. That is why someone on £40,000 does not see 8 percent of £40,000 going in. The tool is for employees checking their payslip pension line, and for small employers sanity-checking what they must pay.
Running the numbers on a £40,000 salary
Using the defaults, a £40,000 salary with the statutory 5 percent employee and 3 percent employer split. The first job is to find the qualifying earnings band.
The bar below shows the contribution split. The employer's £1,013 is, in effect, free money on top of your pay, which is the single best reason never to opt out.
When the qualifying-earnings trap matters
The qualifying-earnings basis quietly shrinks your pension. Because the first £6,240 is excluded, the effective contribution on total pay is always less than the headline 8 percent. A genuinely good employer ignores the band and contributes on full basic salary from the first pound, sometimes matching well above 3 percent. If you are choosing between job offers, the pension basis is worth reading carefully, because two employers both advertising a percent can be paying very different amounts in cash. Increase the employer percentage in this tool and you will see how fast a more generous scheme pulls ahead.
Tax relief and the salary sacrifice upgrade
The employee 5 percent already includes basic-rate tax relief, so for a basic-rate taxpayer the real cost of putting in £1,688 is closer to £1,350 once relief is counted. Higher and additional-rate taxpayers can claim further relief through their tax return or PAYE code. Many employers now run auto-enrolment through salary sacrifice, where you give up the salary before it is taxed and the employer pays it into the pension. That saves you the 8 percent employee National Insurance on the sacrificed amount as well as income tax, and a good employer passes on its own NI saving too. For a higher-rate earner the combined saving makes a pension pound remarkably cheap.
Should I opt out to free up cash?
Almost never. Opting out throws away the employer contribution and the tax relief, which together can more than match your own input. On the example above you would walk away from £1,013 of employer money plus the relief inside your own 5 percent. The only sensible reasons to pause are severe short-term hardship or already being at the £60,000 pension annual allowance. If money is genuinely tight, reducing your own percentage while keeping enough to trigger the full employer match usually beats opting out entirely.
Who has to be enrolled in the first place?
Your employer must automatically enrol you if you are aged between 22 and the state pension age and earn more than £10,000 a year from that job. Earn less, or fall outside that age range, and you can usually still ask to join, and your employer may have to contribute. Auto-enrolment applies per employer, so someone with two jobs is assessed separately by each.