Pension auto-enrolment for hair salons in Ireland: what My Future Fund means for your team
Since 1 January 2026, every employer in Ireland with staff on the payroll and no occupational pension scheme has been inside pension auto-enrolment, trading name My Future Fund. A two-chair salon in Tralee is covered exactly like a corporate with a HR department: there is no small business exemption, no headcount threshold, and no way for the employer to opt out.
If you run a salon with two to six people on the books, 2026 is your first year in the scheme, and the questions land in a predictable order: who on my team is actually in, what does it cost me in euros, what do I have to do in payroll, and what happens to the staff who want out now that the first opt-out windows have opened. This guide answers those questions for a hair salon specifically, with every statutory figure checked on an official Irish source in October 2026.
Two honest framings before we start. First, this is general information for salon owners, not pension or tax advice: confirm the specifics of your own payroll with NAERSA, your payroll provider or your accountant before acting. Second, this blog is published by ViteUneCoupe, a free online booking system for hair salons with 0% commission; pensions are a payroll matter and booking software does not run payroll, but the contributions below are paid out of takings, and takings come from booked chairs, so the two subjects meet at the end.
What My Future Fund is and who runs it
Auto-enrolment is a State-organised retirement savings scheme created by the Automatic Enrolment Retirement Savings System Act 2024 and run by NAERSA, the National Automatic Enrolment Retirement Savings Authority. The scheme went live on 1 January 2026, per Citizens Information's auto-enrolment page (checked in October 2026).
The design is deliberately hands-off for the employer:
- You do not choose a pension provider. There is one scheme, My Future Fund, with NAERSA administering it. You cannot shop around inside auto-enrolment, and you cannot pay more or less than the fixed rates through it. A salon that wants to offer a better pension does that by setting up its own occupational scheme or payroll PRSA, which then takes the employee out of auto-enrolment.
- You do not assess eligibility. NAERSA reads the payroll submissions you already send Revenue with every pay run and applies the rules itself. Your job is to register on the My Future Fund employer portal, act on the enrolment notifications, deduct and remit.
- Your employees deal with NAERSA, not with you, for opt-outs, suspensions and investment choices.
Who on a salon team is enrolled
An employee is automatically enrolled when all three of these are true, per Citizens Information (checked in October 2026):
- aged 23 or over and under 60;
- earning €20,000 or more a year across all their employments, not just yours;
- not already contributing to an occupational pension scheme, PRSA or similar through payroll in that employment.
Most salons have no occupational scheme, so in practice the age band and the €20,000 line decide everything. Here is how it falls on a typical team:
| Person | Auto-enrolled? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Senior stylist, 34, full time | Yes | Inside the age band, over €20,000 |
| Full-time stylist, 26, on the minimum wage | Yes | 39 hours at €14.15 is about €28,700 a year |
| Part-timer, 45, 24 hours a week | It depends | Earnings count across all employments (see below) |
| Junior, 20, full time | No, for now | Under 23; enrolled automatically once they qualify |
| Apprentice, 19, on the National Hairdressing Apprenticeship | No, for now | Under 23 and usually under €20,000 |
| Chair renter | Never | Self-employed, not your employee |
| Owner-director on the payroll | Usually yes | A director paid through payroll who meets the criteria is treated like any employee; confirm with your accountant |
Four of those rows deserve a closer look.
The part-timer and the €20,000 line. The threshold is assessed across every employment the person has. A colourist doing 24 hours a week in your salon at €16 an hour earns €19,968 from you, just under the line; if she also does a few hours anywhere else on another payroll, Revenue's data puts her over €20,000 and each employer enrols her separately, each contributing on the earnings in their own employment. You cannot plan around this, because you cannot see her other payslips: NAERSA can. The hours you give her still move her earnings in your employment, which is one more reason to plan hours deliberately; our guide to staff rosters in an Irish hair salon covers that side.
Juniors and apprentices under 23. Taking on an apprentice has its own rulebook, covered in our guide to hiring an apprentice hairdresser in Ireland. For pensions, they are not auto-enrolled yet, and that is a cash-flow mercy in year one, but it is temporary: NAERSA keeps reassessing from live payroll data, so the junior who turns 23 while earning over €20,000 is enrolled automatically, with no action or warning from you beyond the portal notification. Diarise 23rd birthdays the way you diarise minimum wage age bands. People outside the bands can also ask to join voluntarily; point them to NAERSA rather than ruling on it yourself.
Chair renters are not in your scheme, full stop. A genuine chair renter is a self-employed business paying you rent, so there is no employer contribution and nothing for you to do. But this cuts the other way: if your "renter" is an employee in disguise, you have been missing pension contributions on top of all the other misclassification exposure. The boundary is worth getting right; our guide to renting a chair in an Irish hair salon goes through it.
Staff already in a pension through your payroll are excluded from auto-enrolment in that employment. A personal pension the stylist pays from her own bank account does not count; it must go through payroll.
What it costs: the rates and the ten-year climb
Contributions are a fixed percentage of gross pay, including commission, calculated each pay period, with nothing collected on the part of anyone's pay above €80,000 a year (a cap few salon payslips will meet). The rates step up every three years:
| Calendar years | You (employer) | Employee | State top-up |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 to 2028 | 1.5% | 1.5% | 0.5% |
| 2029 to 2031 | 3% | 3% | 1% |
| 2032 to 2034 | 4.5% | 4.5% | 1.5% |
| 2035 onwards | 6% | 6% | 2% |
Source: Citizens Information, checked in October 2026. The State top-up replaces income tax relief: the employee gets €1 from the State for every €3 they put in, whatever their tax band.
A worked example on a realistic salon payroll
A deliberately simple, entirely hypothetical salon in year one of the scheme: three enrolled employees, weekly pay, 2026 rates.
| Enrolled employee | Gross pay | Your 1.5%, per week | Your 1.5%, per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full-time stylist, 39 h at the €14.15 minimum wage | €551.85/week | €8.28 | about €430 |
| Senior stylist on €36,000 a year | €692.31/week | €10.38 | €540 |
| Part-timer on €19,968 here, enrolled via a second job | €384/week | €5.76 | about €300 |
| Total employer cost, year one | about €24.42 | about €1,270 |
Call it roughly €1,300 a year, or €25 a week, for a three-person enrolled payroll at those wages. Manageable, but do not budget on today's number: the same payroll at the 6% rate from 2035 costs about €5,100 a year at today's pay, and pay will not stand still either, with the minimum wage already confirmed at €14.94 from 1 January 2027. The employer contribution also rides on top of employer PRSI, statutory sick pay and the rest of the real cost of a stylist, which we break down in our guide to hairdresser wages in Ireland. The planning mistake to avoid is pricing 2026 services against 2026 contribution rates and forgetting the escalator.
One more budgeting note: commission counts. A stylist whose gross swings with her column swings your 1.5% with it, pay period by pay period. Payroll software handles the arithmetic; your margin has to handle the amount.
The mechanics: what actually happens in payroll
The flow, as NAERSA and payroll providers describe it (checked in October 2026 on myfuturefund.ie):
- Register on the My Future Fund employer portal with your ROS certificate, or have your payroll agent do it with the proper authority, and set up the payment method, normally a variable direct debit.
- NAERSA identifies your eligible staff from the payroll data you already send Revenue and issues an enrolment notification (payroll software calls it the AEPN) telling you who to enrol and from when.
- Each pay run, you deduct the employee's contribution from net pay (after tax, PRSI and USC, since there is no tax relief on it), add your own matching contribution, and your payroll software reports the amounts in a contribution submission.
- NAERSA collects by direct debit after the pay date and adds the State top-up. The money is invested in the employee's name; you hold nothing and administer no fund.
If your salon runs on a mainstream Irish payroll package or an accountant's bureau service, almost all of this is built in, and the honest advice is to lean on them: your job reduces to registering, keeping the direct debit funded and never quietly skipping a pay period. If you still do payroll by hand in a spreadsheet, auto-enrolment is the moment that stopped being a good idea.
Two things the rules specifically forbid you to do: you cannot encourage or pressure anyone to opt out, and you cannot penalise an employee for staying in. Both have their own sanctions, and an employee can take either to the WRC.
Tax treatment, briefly
- Your employer contributions are deductible as a business expense against your profits, and they are not a benefit-in-kind for the employee, per Revenue's Pensions Manual chapter on auto-enrolment (checked in October 2026). The real cost of the 1.5% is therefore a little below the headline for a profitable salon.
- Employee contributions get no income tax relief. The State top-up replaces it, which is better than 20% relief for a standard-rate stylist and worse than 40% relief for a higher-rate one. This is exactly the kind of question to send to NAERSA or an advisor, not to answer across the reception desk.
Opt-outs, suspensions, and why October 2026 is when you hear about them
Staff enrolled in January 2026 hit their first exit window in late summer, so if your team has started asking, that is why. The rules, per Citizens Information (checked in October 2026):
- An employee cannot opt out in the first six months. In months seven and eight after enrolment they can opt out and get their own contributions refunded; your contributions and the State top-up stay invested in their pot.
- After month eight the opt-out door closes, but they can suspend contributions at any time; everyone's contributions pause, nothing is refunded, and a restart has its own waiting rules.
- Anyone who opts out or suspends and still meets the criteria is automatically re-enrolled after two years. The scheme is built to keep catching people.
- You, the employer, have no opt-out, ever, and while an employee is suspended or opted out you simply stop that person's contributions; the obligation resumes when NAERSA says so.
Keep your own conduct clean here: answer "how do I opt out" with "through the My Future Fund portal, from month seven", and say nothing that could read as encouragement. The refund mechanics and the re-enrolment are NAERSA's job, not yours.
What happens if you ignore it
NAERSA has said publicly that its first posture is to help employers comply rather than reach for sanctions, but the sanctions in the 2024 Act are serious: compliance notices and fixed penalties for administrative failures, fines that scale up to €50,000 and, for the most serious offences, prosecution with up to three years' imprisonment, plus interest on unpaid contributions and WRC compensation for employees who were blocked or penalised (Citizens Information, checked in October 2026). Because NAERSA works from the same payroll data Revenue holds, non-compliance is not something a registered employer can quietly sit out: the system can see every payslip you report.
The realistic failure mode for a small salon is not defiance, it is drift: a bounced direct debit, an unread portal notification, a new hire nobody flagged. A monthly five-minute check of the portal alongside your payroll run covers it.
The contribution is fixed, the takings that pay for it are not
There is no negotiating 1.5% rising to 6%, and no software trick that changes it. What you can influence is the other side of the ledger: how full the columns are that generate the gross pay the percentages sit on. That is the part we can honestly help with. ViteUneCoupe's free plan gives your salon unlimited online bookings with 0% commission, permanently, a booking page, a service catalogue, per-stylist schedules and a client database, so filling the book adds no per-booking cost on top of the payroll costs this article just added up. The Standard plan, from 29 € excl. VAT per month with no commitment, adds confirmation, reminder and thank-you emails plus calendar sync. ViteUneCoupe is not payroll software and sends no SMS in any plan: pensions, payslips and PRSI stay with your payroll tool and your accountant, where they belong.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a small business exemption from auto-enrolment in Ireland?
No. My Future Fund applies to every employer with eligible employees from 1 January 2026, whatever the headcount. A salon with one qualifying stylist has the same obligations as a chain: register, enrol when notified, deduct, match and remit.
Who on my salon team is automatically enrolled?
Employees aged 23 to 59 earning €20,000 or more a year across all their employments, who are not already in a pension through your payroll. Juniors and apprentices under 23 are out until they qualify, and are then enrolled automatically. Chair renters are self-employed and never enrolled by you.
What does auto-enrolment cost a salon employer in 2026?
1.5% of each enrolled employee's gross pay, capped at €80,000 of pay a year. For a full-time stylist on the €14.15 minimum wage that is about €430 a year; a three-person enrolled payroll at typical salon wages runs around €1,300. The rate rises to 3% in 2029, 4.5% in 2032 and 6% from 2035, and employer contributions are tax-deductible.
Can my employees opt out of My Future Fund?
Not immediately. They can opt out in months seven and eight after enrolment and get their own contributions back; yours and the State's stay in their pot. After that they can suspend contributions at any time, and anyone still eligible is automatically re-enrolled after two years. You cannot opt out as an employer and must never encourage staff to leave.
What are the penalties for a salon that does not comply?
The 2024 Act provides for compliance notices, fixed penalties, fines of up to €50,000 and up to three years' imprisonment for the most serious offences, plus interest on unpaid contributions and WRC claims from affected employees. NAERSA says it will help employers comply first, but it sees the same payroll data as Revenue, so gaps are visible.
