The Government is being urged not to defer the deadline for auto-enrolment of workers into pension schemes beyond early 2026.
The deadline is set to be pushed by beyond the current September date, in an effort to keep business costs low.
Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers said it is expected to be a short deferment.
Mairead O’ Mahony, Head of Human Capital at Aon Ireland, said the postponement is not unexpected given that the tender for investment managers to manage the assets generated by auto-enrolment was only issued recently.
Ms O’Mahony urged Goverment not to delay beyond January 2026.
“Many employers will welcome this extra time to prepare because there is a lot of complexity involved in deciding how to handle auto-enrolment, but we really think it’s important that we don’t delay beyond the January 2026 deadline that the minister suggested at the weekend.”
She said, as a country, we have been talking about auto-enrolment for nearly a generation.
“The purpose of auto-enrolment is to bring a huge amount of workers who currently have no pension savings into the savings net, so that’s 800,000 workers who are currently not saving for retirement,” she explained.
She said it will drive financial resilience of the workforce. “It is really essential to ensure that Irish employees are prepared for the future, and fundamentally it’s just a good thing for business.”
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A majority of businesses are already preparing to engage with auto-enrolment. The Aon Ireland executive advised those businesses to continue with their plans. “Continue, keep going, there’s still lots to do so don’t pause”, she urged.
“Those who haven’t yet started I would say get going because there is a really an enormous amount of work to be done,” she said.
“For the smartest employers that are currently engaged in thinking about auto-enrolment, they are thinking about this not as an additional cost on their business or a tax for employees, they are thinking about this as part of their broader employee proposition,” she told Morning Ireland. “How can we use this new framework to help and retain the type of employees that we want?”
The gender pension gap is the gap between the savings that men and women have for retirement, and it currently stands at around 35%.
“We have less than one in three women currently receiving a private pension so the longer we push out pension enrolment, the longer that gender pension gap persists because the auto-enrolment system will absolutely hack away at that gap,” she added.
