Ireland auto-enrolment: employer cost per pay run

Twenty-one eligible staff on an Irish payroll cost the employer EUR 13,860 in auto-enrolment contributions this year, and the payroll manager in Dublin who worked it out in a spreadsheet had EUR 7,560. The difference, EUR 6,300 a year, is one assumption: that the EUR 20,000 earnings figure comes off each salary before the percentage.

It does not. Ireland's automatic enrolment scheme, My Future Fund, started with the January 2026 pay run after the regulations were signed on 22 December 2025. EUR 20,000 is the eligibility trigger. It decides who gets enrolled, alongside age 23 to 60 and not already being in a workplace pension. Once an employee is in, the employer contribution is 1.5% of gross pay from the first euro, capped at EUR 80,000 of salary.

The UK works the other way. There, contributions sit on a band of qualifying earnings with a lower limit deducted first, and every pension calculator, spreadsheet template and chatbot trained on UK payroll answers in that shape. Ask a general AI assistant what auto-enrolment costs an Irish employer and you often get a band deduction that does not exist in Irish law. At the 2026 rate the error is EUR 300 per head per year, quietly under-stating a line finance already signed off.

This extension does the arithmetic the Irish way. You enter how many eligible staff earn between EUR 20,000 and EUR 80,000, their average gross pay, and how many are paid above the cap. It returns six figures: the employer cost at the phase rate you pick, the cost per pay run, the State top-up on the same payroll, the euro amount the band mistake hides, the same payroll priced at the 6% end rate, and what is still to find against whatever you already provisioned.

Worked through: 18 staff on an average EUR 38,000 plus 3 staff over the cap is a pensionable base of EUR 924,000. At 1.5% that is EUR 13,860 a year and EUR 1,155 per monthly pay run, with a State top-up of EUR 4,620. Run the same payroll weekly instead and the per-run figure is what changes; run it at the 2029 rate of 3% and the annual figure doubles to EUR 27,720.

That second number belongs in front of a finance director now. The employer rate is not static. It steps every three years: 1.5% for 2026 to 2028, 3% for 2029 to 2031, 4.5% for 2032 to 2034 and 6% from 2035, with the State top-up moving 0.5%, 1%, 1.5% and 2% alongside it. The payroll above, unchanged, costs EUR 55,440 a year at the end rate. A three-year budget built on the 2026 number is wrong by design, and the step lands on a January pay run when nobody is looking for it.

A retail chain shows how fast the band mistake scales. Sixty staff on an average EUR 26,000, paid weekly, is EUR 23,400 a year in employer contributions and EUR 450 a week. Deduct EUR 20,000 from each of those salaries first and you would budget EUR 18,000 too little, because the deduction eats most of a EUR 26,000 salary. The lower the average wage, the worse the error gets.

Everything described above is free. There is no key, no headcount limit, no watermark and no locked result. It runs in the browser, sends no payroll data anywhere, and the same calculation runs on the free web page. The paid layer is a different axis: a $60 licence key exports the costing as a dated CSV row for the budget file, and sets a browser alert ahead of the 1 January 2029 step to 3%.

An Irish payroll bureau charges roughly EUR 5 to EUR 12 per payslip, and a fully managed service EUR 15 to EUR 25 per employee per month. Asking that bureau to re-forecast auto-enrolment across the phase steps is chargeable advisory time on top.